Diabetes-related neuropathy is a debilitating condition that may be averted if it can be detected early. One possible way this can be achieved at low cost is to utilise peptides to detect C-peptide, a biomarker of diabetic neuropathy. This depends on...
Protein complexes perform a diversity of functions in natural biological systems. While computational protein design has enabled the development of symmetric protein complexes with spherical shapes and hollow interiors, the individual subunits often...
One-bead-one-compound peptide libraries, developed following the top-down experimental approach, have attracted great interest in the identification of potential ligands or active peptides. By exploiting a reverse experimental design approach based o...
In medical imaging, techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging, contrast-enhanced computerized tomography, positron emission tomography (PET), and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are extensively available and routinely used for...
New protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are identified, but PPIs have different physicochemical properties compared with conventional targets, making it difficult to use small molecules. Peptides offer a new modality to target PPIs, but designi...
Peptide therapeutics occupy a unique chemical space between small molecules and biologics, combining high target specificity with structural programmability and favorable safety profiles. Recent regulatory approvals and expanding clinical pipelines u...
Peptides, or short chains of amino-acid residues, are becoming increasingly important as active ingredients of drugs and as crucial probes and/or tools in medical, biotechnological, and pharmaceutical research. Situated at the interface between small...
The overuse of antibiotics has accelerated the evolution and mutation of drug-resistant bacteria, creating an urgent need for novel antimicrobial drugs and feed additives. Antimicrobial peptides, with their unique membrane-disrupting mechanism that r...
The self-recognition and self-assembly of biomolecules are spontaneous processes that occur in Nature and allow the formation of ordered structures, at the nanoscale or even at the macroscale, under thermodynamic and kinetic equilibrium as a conseque...
Antimicrobial resistance is an increasing issue in healthcare as the overuse of antibacterial agents rises during the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for new antibiotics is high, while the arsenal of available agents is decreasing, especially for the tre...
The majority of disease-associated proteins are considered “undruggable” due to the absence of well-defined binding pockets, the presence of extended interaction surfaces, and intrinsic structural disorder, which collectively limit the ef...
The escalating prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria poses an immediate and grave threat to public health. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have gained significant attention as a promising alternative to conventional antibiotics. Animal venom comp...
Understanding of protein-ligand interactions and its influences on protein stability is necessary in the research on all biological processes and correlative applications, for instance, the appropriate affinity ligand design for the purification of...
Background: Tubulin plays a pivotal role in cell division and other essential cellular processes, making it a key pharmacological target for cancer therapy, antiparasitic treatments, and neurodegenerative diseases. Numerous compounds have been develo...
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) that exert multiple functions are considered promising candidates to combat the bacterial drug resistance crisis. Nowadays, targeted peptide modification has been widely recognised to improve biological activity and make...
S100B(ββ) proteins are a family of multifunctional proteins that are present in several tissues and regulate a wide variety of cellular processes. Their altered expression levels have been associated with several human diseases, such as can...
Amphibians are widely distributed on different continents, except for the polar regions. They are important sources for the isolation, purification and characterization of natural compounds, including peptides with various functions. Innate immune an...
Proteins are the foundation of life, and designing functional proteins remains a key challenge in biotechnology. Before the development of AlphaFold2, the focus of design was primarily on structure-centric approaches such as using the well-known open...
Unlike the α-helical and β-sheet antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), our knowledge on amino acid-rich AMPs is limited. This article conducts a systematic study of rich AMPs (>25%) from different life kingdoms based on the Antimicrobial Pepti...
The increasing circulation of multi-drug-resistant pathogens, coupled with the sluggish development of new antibiotics, is weakening our capacity to combat human infections, resulting in elevated death tolls. To address this worldwide crisis, antimic...
Adepantins are peptides designed to optimize antimicrobial biological activity through the choice of specific amino acid residues, resulting in helical and amphipathic structures. This paper focuses on revealing the atomistic details of the mechanism...
Traditional antiviral peptide (AVP) discovery is a time-consuming and expensive process. This study introduces AVP-GPT, a novel deep learning method utilizing transformer-based language models and multimodal architectures specifically designed for AV...
The link between the antimicrobial and anticancer activity of peptides has long been studied, and the number of peptides identified with both activities has recently increased considerably. In this work, we hypothesized that designed peptides with a...
Activating tumor necrosis factor receptor 1 (TNFR1) with tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) is one of the key pathological mechanisms resulting in the exacerbation of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) immune response. Despite various types of drugs bei...
A growing body of evidence now suggests that artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques can serve as an indispensable foundation for the process of drug design and discovery. In light of latest advancements in computing technologies, dee...
In this study, a rationally-designed 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT) binding peptide derived from an amino acid sequence of the complementarity-determining region (CDR) of an anti-TNT monoclonal antibody was used for TNT detection based on a maleimide-fu...
One of the most important events in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease and related disorders is the formation of abnormal fibrils via the aggregation of α-synuclein (α-syn) with β-sheet-rich organization. The use of Cryo-E...
Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase complex-interacting multifunctional protein 1 (AIMP1)-derived peptide (AdP) has been developed as a cosmeceutical ingredient for skin anti-aging given its fibroblast-activating (FA) and melanocyte-inhibiting (MI) functions....
In 2019, novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) began infecting humans, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic. While the push for development of vaccines has yielded some positive results, the emergence of additional variants...
(1) Background: Proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin 9 (PCSK9) is responsible for the degradation of the hepatic low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR), which regulates the circulating cholesterol level. In this field, we discovered natural peptid...
Objective: The six-helix bundle (6-HB) is critical for HIV-1 membrane fusion. To disrupt this process, peptide inhibitors have been meticulously designed to target interactions within the 6-HB regions, thereby blocking membrane fusion and exerting in...
(1) Background: Antimicrobial resistance represents an urgent health dilemma facing the global human population. The development of novel antimicrobial agents is needed to face the rising number of resistant bacteria. Ultrashort antimicrobial peptide...
Encephalitogenic T cells are heavily implicated in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune demyelinating disease of the central nervous system. Their stimulation is triggered by the formation of a trimolecular complex between the h...
More than 930,000 protein–protein interactions (PPIs) have been identified in recent years, but their physicochemical properties differ from conventional drug targets, complicating the use of conventional small molecules as modalities. Cyclic p...
A multitude of membrane active peptides exists that divides into subclasses, such as cell penetrating peptides (CPPs) capable to enter eukaryotic cells or antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) able to interact with prokaryotic cell envelops. Peptide membrane...
Fusion of lipid-enveloped viruses with the cellular plasma membrane or the endosome membrane is mediated by viral envelope proteins that undergo large conformational changes following binding to receptors. The HIV-1 fusion protein gp41 undergoes a tr...
Background: Gene therapy can be viewed as a promising/valuable therapeutic approach directed to cancer treatment, including glioblastoma. Concretely, the combination of gene therapy with chemotherapy could increase its therapeutic index due to a syne...
Natural peptides derived from plants have been an important source of medical substances for several decades. Due to their mechanism of action, chemical potential, and favourable side effect profile, these peptides represent a safer alternative to sy...
Synthetic peptides are increasingly used in cosmetic products due to their potential to regulate biological processes related to skin aging, pigmentation, inflammation, extracellular matrix maintenance, and other aspects of skin health. However, the...
Although loop epitopes at protein-protein binding interfaces often play key roles in mediating oligomer formation and interaction specificity, their binding sites are underexplored as drug targets owing to their high flexibility, relatively few hot s...
Nature’s way for bioactive peptides is to provide them with several related functions and the ability to cooperate in performing their job. Natural cell-penetrating peptides (CPP), such as penetratins, inspired the design of multifunctional con...
The rapid mutations of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 require vaccine updates and the development of novel antiviral drugs. This article presents an improved database filtering technology for a more effective design of novel antiviral agents. Different f...
The growing incidences of new viral diseases and increasingly frequent viral epidemics have strained therapeutic and preventive measures; the high mutability of viral genes puts additional strains on developmental efforts. Given the high cost and tim...
Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and its receptors (VEGFRs) play a main role in the regulation of angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis. Furthermore, they are implicated in the onset of several diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, degenerativ...
Emulsifiers are gradually evolving from synthetic molecules of petrochemical origin to biomolecules mainly due to health and environmental concerns. Peptides represent a type of biomolecules whose molecular structure is composed of a sequence of amin...
Collagen is fundamental to a vast diversity of health functions and potential therapeutics. Short peptides targeting collagen are attractive for designing modular systems for site-specific delivery of bioactive agents. Characterization of peptide&nda...
Cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs) have been discovered to deliver chemical drugs, nucleic acids, and macromolecules to permeate cell membranes, creating a novel route for exogenous substances to enter cells. Up until now, various sequence structures a...
In this paper, we describe a peptide library designed by computational modelling and the selection of two peptide sequences showing affinity towards the mycotoxin, ochratoxin A (OTA). A virtual library of 20 natural amino acids was used as building b...
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been identified as a potentially new class of antibiotics to combat bacterial resistance to conventional drugs. The design of de novo AMPs with high therapeutic indexes, low cost of synthesis, high resistance to pro...
A strategy for the design of antimicrobial cyclic peptides derived from the lead compounds c(KKLKKFKKLQ) (BPC194) and c(KLKKKFKKLQ) (BPC198) is reported. First, the secondary β-structure of BPC194 and BPC198 was analyzed by carrying out molecular dyn...
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