Novel self-assembling peptide nanostructures with antimicrobial activity

Infective diseases have been widely controlled by antibiotics, whose extensive use for both human and animal care has resulted in the development of microbial resistance. Great attention has been recently devoted to the possibility of using self-assembling peptides for the obtainment of nanostructures with antibacterial activity but most studies are limited to self-assembling entities and to verifying their eventual antibacterial activity.1,2 Our objective is the obtainment of a versatile nanosystem composed of self-assembling sequences with antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) on the surface. For this purpose, we synthetized two different peptide sequences, one shorter which should aid the self-assembling process, and the other longer and containing two moieties (the one serving for the assembly and the one serving as antimicrobial agent). In this study, we used as proof of concept an active analogue of the antimicrobial peptide myxinidin3 and we modified it in order to insert the peptide in the self-assembling structure. We focussed on the possibility of exploiting this self-assembled antibacterial to improve activity against biofilms. We performed a physico-chemical characterization of the self-assembled structures using several techniques and we analysed the antibiofilm activity testing the capability to inhibit the biofilm growth or promote the eradication. The study has demonstrated that our peptide structures are promising tools against biofilm formation.