Identification and Characterization of Novel Antimicrobial Peptide from Hippocampus comes by In Silico and Experimental Studies

Abstract

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have attracted attentions as a novel antimicrobial agent because of their unique activity against microbes. In the present study, we described a new, previously unreported AMP, moronecidin-like peptide, from Hippocampus comes and compared its antimicrobial activity with moronecidin from hybrid striped bass. Antibacterial assay indicated that gram-positive bacteria were more sensitive to moronecidin and moronecidin-like compared with gram-negative bacteria. Furthermore, both AMPs were found to exhibit effective antifungal activity. Comparative analysis of the antimicrobial activity revealed that moronecidin-like peptide has higher activity against Acinetobacter baumannii and Staphylococcus epidermidis relative to moronecidin. Both moronecidin-like and moronecidin peptides retained their antibacterial activity in physiological pH and salt concentration. The time-killing assay showed that the AMPs completely killed A. baumannii and S. epidermidis isolates after 1 and 5 h at five- and tenfold above their corresponding MICs, respectively. Anti-biofilm assay demonstrated that peptides were able to inhibit 50% of biofilm formation at sub-MIC of 1/8 MIC. Furthermore, moronecidin-like significantly inhibited biofilm formation more than moronecidin at 1/16 MIC. Collectively, our results revealed that antimicrobial and anti-biofilm activities of moronecidin-like are comparable to moronecidin. In addition, the hemolytic and cytotoxic activities of moronecidin-like were lower than those of moronecidin, suggesting it as a potential novel therapeutic agent, and a template to design new therapeutic AMPs.

Peptidomics‐based identification of an antimicrobial peptide derived from goat milk fermented by Lactobacillus rhamnosus ( C25 )

“…The antimicrobial activity of peptides was checked against different pathogens such as E. faecalis , B. cereus , S. typhi, L. monocytogenes , and E. coli by agar well assay method with slight modification. It was done to test the inhibitory effect of different fragments at desired concentration of AMPs (Mohammadi et al, 2018). For this purpose, 100 μl (~1x10 6 CFU/ml) overnight grown pathogens were added to BHI agar plates and allowed for solidification.…”

“…However, the majority of BAPs are majorly generated from casein because it is the major protein in milk (approximately 70 to 80% of the total milk protein) (Potočnik et al, 2011). The production of BAPs from milk proteins requires the use of microbial enzymes that come from proteolytic dairy cultures (Mohammadi et al, 2018). Lactobacilli are commonly used in proteolytic culture in the dairy industry for the production of dairy fermented food products.…”

Revealing Natural Intracellular Peptides in Gills of Seahorse Hippocampus reidi

“…The membrane disruption of moronecidin in microbes is due to the formation of a pore [ 31 ]. The alignment of moronecidin-like peptide, originally identified in H. comes , with other piscidins shows that the signal peptide is conserved, whereas the sequences of the mature peptide are variable [ 35 ]. A total of fifteen fragments from the moronecidin-like peptide were found in gill samples of H. reidi ( Figure 4 A).…”

Dicentracin-Like from Asian sea bass Fish and Moronecidine-Like from Hippocampus Comes: Two Candidate Antimicrobial Peptides Against Leishmanina major Infection

“…In the current study, we compared the anti-L. major activities of the three AMPs dicentracine-like, moronecidin-like, and piscidin (Mohammadi et al 2018;Taheri et al 2018). The three AMPs exhibit dose dependent activity against L. major promastigotes, with piscidin being the most efficacious one as compared to the other two peptides, and induced promastigote lysis at a high peptide concentration.…”

“…In our previous study, we characterized two novel antimicrobial peptides, called moronecidin-like (from Asian sea bass fish) and moronecidine-like (from hippocampus comes) peptides, which exhibited efficient antibacterial activity against both gram-positive and gram negative bacteria, and their antibacterial activities were somewhat dependent on electrostatic interactions with bacterial cell walls (Mohammadi et al 2018;Taheri et al 2018). In this study, we evaluated the anti-Leishmania properties of moronecidin-like and dicentracin-like AMPs against promastigotes and intracellular amastigotes of L. major cultured in macrophages, in comparison to the well-characterized AMP piscidin.…”