| dc.description.abstract | Antimicrobial peptides (AMP) are evolutionarily conserved components of the
innate immune system. They have a broad spectrum of action against bacteria,
fungi and viruses. Therefore, AMP are studied as probable substitutes of the
traditional antibiotics, for which most pathogens have developed resistance.
The main objective of this work was the design of novel linear peptides
capable to interact with the cellular membrane of the common pathogens.
In this work, sequences of active AMP were carefully obtained from the scientific
literature and collected in Yadamp (http://yadamp.unisa.it/), a database of AMP
created recently in the laboratory where this project was carried out. In Yadamp,
there are information about peptides name, amino acid sequence, length, presence
of disulfide bridges, date of discovery, activity and taxonomy. The most relevant
chemical-physical properties are also listed. This database is mainly focused on
the peptides activities. Experimental MIC values (the lowest concentration of an
antimicrobial that inhibits the visible growth of a microorganism) are constantly
obtained from careful reading the original papers. In this work, a great
contribution was made in the enrichment of the database. In fact, 1009 sequences
were added to Yadamp. It currently contains 3142 AMP sequences. For these
AMP, 573 molecular descriptors were calculated. In addition, this project also
involved the search for new molecular descriptors. Yadamp is a resource for
QSAR investigations on AMP. It allows to create subsets of AMP, homogeneous
in one, two or more parameters...[abstract by Author] | it_IT |
