Isolation And Gene Cloning Of An Antifungal Peptide From The Seeds Of Scurpea (Psoralea Corylifolia L.)

Antimicrobial peptide is a family of small mass weight polypeptides which can inhibit or kill the growth of pathogenic microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. During the growth and development, it is inevitable for plants to be attacked by different pathogenic microorganisms in the nature. Plants have evolved all kinds of effective defense systems to prevent it from invasion. A wide array of antimicrobial peptides or proteins, produced either in a constitutional or in an inducible manner, are believed to be involved in such mechanisms. So far, many plant peptides or proteins with antimicrobial activities in vitro have been identified including chitinase, chitin binding proteins, hevein-like peptides, beta-1,3-glucanase, PR-1-type proteins, thionins, lipid transfer proteins, plant defensins and knottin-like peptides. Among these peptides and proteins, thionins, plant defensins, lipid transfer peptide, and hevein-like and konttin-like peptides are all small (29~ 54 amino acids) and cysteine-rich peptides, but they are highly divergent in their sequences and exhibit quite different antimicrobial activities. These antimicrobial peptides extensively exist in plants, animails, even virus. They have many merits such as small mass weight, broad-spectrum in antimicrobial activities, special antimicrobial mechanism. It makes antimicrobial peptides have a wide respective to apply in the fields of plant gene engineering, food engineering and biomedicine etc. The yield of food supplies all the world is estimated to have about fifteen perecent loss every year caused by plant disease. Many researchers work hard at looking for effective pathways to lower the loss. Now it is well-known that more than five hundred kinds of antimicrobial peptides have been identified from plants. It will offer abundant selectable materials to plant gene engineering. Recently, with the further study of polypeptides, people come to realize more clearly that the traditional Chinese Medicine, always applied for thousands of years, is a sort of very important resource that can not be ignored. This assay select the material of...