An in-silico survey of putative antimicrobial peptides in myxobacterial genomes

Benita Arakal (Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK)

10:40 - 10:50 Wednesday 13 July Morning

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Session overview

Antimicrobial resistance is a hidden pandemic with exponential increases in infections claiming lives, hospitalisations, and financial burdens. As soon as new antibiotics are introduced, resistance to those agents emerges thus, necessitating the need for alternative non-antibiotic adjuvants. This study aims to investigate the bioactive potential from antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) within predatory myxobacteria as a suitable candidate in discovering novel therapeutics in eradicating drug-resistant infections. This study utilises a suite of bioinformatic tools to investigate potential bio-activities such as antimicrobial and anti-biofilm activities of AMPs from myxobacteria. Around 672 potential AMP sequences were extracted from eight complete myxobacterial genomes. Most putative AMPs were predicted to be active against Klebsiella pneumoniae with least activity being predicted against Staphylococcus aureus. 117 potent putative AMPs were predicted to have very good activity against more than two bacterial pathogens and these were characterised further in-silico. Potent putative AMPs were predicted to have anti-inflammatory and anti-fungal properties, but none were predicted to be active against viruses. 22% of them were predicted to be haemolytic to human erythrocytes, five were predicted to have anticancer properties and 47% were predicted to be biofilm-active. 14 putative AMPs had high sequence similarity to proteins which were functionally associated with proteins of known function. The in-silico survey of eight complete myxobacterial genomes presented in this study has unveiled putative AMPs which are predicted to have potent antibacterial properties. This study marks the first genome-wide characterisation of myxobacterial ribosomally-synthesised AMPs and highlights 37 particularly promising AMPs as novel antimicrobial agents.

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