| New antibiotics against multidrug-resistant bacteria are urgently needed, but rapid acquisition of resistance limits their usefulness. Endogenous antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) with moderate selectivity, but multimodal mechanism of action, have remained effective against bacteria for millions of years. Their therapeutic application, however, requires optimizing the balance between antibacterial activity and selectivity, so that rational design methods for increasing selectivity are highly desirable. We have created training (n=36) and testing (n=37) sets from frog-derived AMPs with determined therapeutic index (TI). The 'sequence moments' concept then enabled us to find a one-parameter linear model resulting in a good correlation between... |
