Expression, Purification, Functional And Structural Characterization Of Human Antimicrobial Peptide Dermcidin, And Staphylococci Sense And Strike Back The Anionic Peptide Dermcidin

The continuous use of chemical antibiotics has led to the appearance of multi-resistant bacterial strains all over the world, which resulted in higher mortality of many infectious diseases. Therefore, it is urgent to search for alternatives to traditional antibiotics. Antimicrobial peptides are an important component of the innate immune response and play a key role as the first line of defense against infections. Due to the antimicrobial peptides lack of accumulation in microorganism in vivo and inducing cross-resistance, and their broad-spectrum antimicrobial activities against bacteria, fungi, viruses and tumors, antimicrobial peptides have promising therapeutic potentials.Dermcidin is a novel antimicrobial peptide identified from human glands by Schittek et al most recently. Dermcidin has broad-spectrum antimicrobial activities against Gram-positive , Gram-negative bacteria and fungi, and also has therapeutic potentials against cancer, such as breast cancer. As a drug, dermcidin has lack of antigenicity and could be an ideal alternative to antibiotics. However, it is poorly understood about dermcidin's functional and structural characterizations , structure-function relationships and the bacterial resistance mechanism, which limits the applications of dermcidin in infectious diseases and inflammations.