Dear Colleagues,

The discovery of antibiotics has extended human life expectancy by decreasing infectious disease mortality. However excessive misuse of antibiotics and a sharp decrease in the discovery of novel antibiotics lead to the emergence of the drug-resistant pathogen, known as “superbugs”. The number of bacterial infections caused by superbugs has been increasing rapidly worldwide, posing a serious threat to humanity. To combat drug resistance, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), also known as host-defense peptides, play crucial roles as novel antibiotics due to their distinctive mode of action and rapid killing rate against drug-resistant pathogens, proving the clinical potential. In general, AMPs, are 10-50 amino acids containing peptides, are an integral part of the immune system that is present in multicellular organisms including insects, plants, amphibians and mammals. In general, most AMPs are oligopeptides containing excess positively charged (mostly, not all) and hydrophobic amino acids, which facilitate amphipathic conformations upon contact with microbial membranes.  The first method of AMPs killing mechanism involves the disruption of membrane integrity through electrostatic interactions between cationic charges in AMPs and negative charges in microbial membranes. Secondly, pathogens are killed by either associating with specific intracellular targets or inhibiting proteins, DNA and RNA synthesis, In addition to their antimicrobial activity, AMPs are reported to display antioxidant, anticancer, antimalarial, and wound healing properties. Although AMPs possess a number of merits as novel antibiotics, their advancement as therapeutic agents is still limited due to their large structure involving complex synthetic routes and expensive production cost, proteolytic degradation, and poor activity in the presence of salts. Moreover, the clinical use of AMPs that resemble human defense peptides may cause inevitable loss to the human defense system. To overcome these issues, a variety of new synthetic or natural AMPs must be discovered considering the facts including physicochemical properties, structural diversity, and diverse mechanisms of action, which is the key aim of this special issue. Novel AMPs can be developed through theoretical design, semi-synthesis, and synthesis of mimicking peptides by modifying existing peptides. Further, advancements in AMP can be visualized by developing AMP-hybrids, dendrimeric AMPs and polypeptides, peptidomimetics involving unnatural/D-amino acids, and AMP-drug conjugates.

The Antibiotics editorial team decided to come up with a special issue that seeks manuscript submissions addressing the above features to elevate the wider therapeutic application of AMPs in treating infectious diseases.

Dr. Gunasekaran Pethaiah
Dr. Rajesh Kuppusamy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Antibiotics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• antimicrobial peptides
• peptidomimetics
• structure activity relationship study (SAR)
• mechanism of action
• amphipathic peptides
• functional diversity of peptides
• microbial killing mechanism, membrane polarisation, structural features of peptides, peptide–membrane interactions, inner membrane polarisation, outer membrane polarisation, peptide killing kinetics, antibiotics resistant bacteria, anti-inflammatory agents, antibiofilm activity, synergy with antiobiotics