Mining viral proteins for antimicrobial and cell-penetrating drug delivery peptides

摘要

Motivation: The need for more effective and safer pharmaceuticals is a persistent quest. Microbial adaptations create the need to permanently develop new antimicrobials (AMPs), for instance. Similarly, intracellular delivery of drugs is still a challenge and translocation of membranes for drug delivery is an area of intense research. Peptides can be used both as AMP drug leads and drug carrier systems for intracellular delivery. Multifunctional proteins are abundant in viruses but, surprisingly, have never been thoroughly screened for bioactive peptide sequences.