Finding the holy grail of re-engineering peptide design — for better antibiotics and beyond — ScienceDaily

Peptides — short strings of amino acids — play a vital role in health and industry with a huge range of medical uses including in antibiotics, anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer drugs. They are also used in the cosmetics industry and for enhancing athletic performance.

Altering the structure of natural peptides to produce improved compounds is therefore of great interest to scientists and industry. But how the machineries that produce these peptides work still isn’t clearly understood.

Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) scientist Associate Professor Max Cryle has revealed a key aspect of peptide machineries in a paper published in Nature Communications today.

The findings will allow Associate Professor Cryle to advance his lab’s work into re-engineering glycopeptide antibiotics to counter the pressing global threat posed by antimicrobial resistance, and more broadly to…

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