Plant Antibacterial Peptides and their Possible Oligomerization

Abstract

Plant antimicrobial peptides form an integral component of the innate immunity of plants and have activities against a broad spectrum of microorganisms. They were classified into various families and most share general features such as the presence of structure-stabilizing disulfide bridges and positive charge. Self-aggregation was suggested as one of the possible mechanisms for the effect of these antimicrobial peptides. Here, we have created a dataset comprising plant peptides with activity against gram positive and gram negative bacteria. We have found that the majority of the antibacterial peptides in this dataset contain at least one amyloidogenic region. We proposed that these amyloidogenic regions could help in the self-aggregation of the peptides and presented a possible ringlike oligomeric structure of the plant antimicrobial peptide NaD1.