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The biological activity of the selected peptides from the combinatorial library in bacteria, fungi and mammalian cells is studied to characterize the selected peptides and to compare the activity of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) in vitro and in vivo. The analysis has shown that the methods focusing on screening peptide libraries in vitro for membranes with the appropriate interfacial activity has enabled the design, selection and discovery of novel, potent and broad-spectrum membrane-active antibiotics.

A nonclassical approach is used for biomolecular engineering and design of membrane-active peptides. The composition-space peptide libraries coupled with function-based high-throughput screens has led to the discovery of diverse, soluble and highly potent membrane-permeabilizing peptides.

Beta sheet pore forming peptides are characterized and the structure function relationships in lipid vesicles are compared to their activity in biological membranes. Fluorescence spectroscopy and quenching showed that the peptides reside mainly on the bilayer surface and are partially exposed to water, rather than in a membrane-spanning state.

Membrane-permeabilizing peptide antibiotics are an underutilized weapon in the battle against drug-resistant microorganisms. This is true, in part, because of the bottleneck caused by the lack of explicit design principles and the paucity of simple high-throughput methods for selection. In this work, we characterize the requirements for broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity by membrane permeabilization and find that different microbial membranes have very different susceptibilities to permeabilization by individual antimicrobial peptides. Broad-spectrum activity requires only that and AMP have at least a small amount of membrane-permeabilizing activity against multiple classes of microbes, a feature that we show to be rare in a peptide library containing many members with species-specific activity. We compare biological and vesicle-based high-throughput strategies for selecting such broad-spectrum AMPs from combinatorial peptide libraries and demonstrate that a simple in vitro, lipid vesicle-based high-throughput screen is the most effective strategy for rapid discovery of novel, broad-spectrum antimicrobial peptides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]