The Mechanism of Membrane Disruption by Antimicrobial Peptides

Antimicrobial peptides (AMP's) represent a new class of antibiotic agent capable of combating rising resistance to current drugs. While cytolytic AMP's are known to disrupt the outer membrane of bacterial cells, the precise mechanism and factors that determine cell specificity are poorly understood. By combining biochemical analysis, novel biophysical studies and computational modeling our aim is to characterize in detail how host defense AMP's from the skin of Australian amphibians selectively kill bacterial cells. The work will identify specific structural and physico-chemical properties that can be used to design more effective peptide based antibacterial agents.