Novel peptide biomaterials against biofilms

The extensive use of antibiotics for human and animal care has resulted in the development of bacterial resistance towards antibiotics. Recently, great attention is devoted to the possibility to build self-assembling peptide structures with antibacterial activity but most studies are limited to self-assembling entities to verify their eventual antibacterial activity.[1,2] The objective of this research project is to have a versatile nanosystem composed of a self-assembling sequences with antimicrobial activity due to the presence of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). For this purpose, we used two different 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. The antimicrobial peptide WMR[3] was used in this study and properly modified in order to be inserted the self-assembling structure. We focus on the possibility of exploiting the multivalent presentation of AMPs on self-assembled nanostructures to improve antibiofilm activity. We used several techniques for a physico-chemical characterization of the self-assembled structures and performed experiments on microorganisms to test the capability to inhibit the biofilm growth or promote the eradication. The study has demonstrated that our peptide structures are promising tool against biofilms.