The paper Optimizing Antimicrobial Peptide Dendrimers in Chemical Space has been published by Angewandte Chemie.

Abstract

Here we used nearest neighbor searches in chemical space to improve the activity of antimicrobial peptide dendrimer (AMPD) G3KL and identified dendrimer T7 with an expanded activity range against Gram‐negative pathogenic bacteria including Klebsiellae pneumoniae, increased serum stability and promising activity in an in vivo infection model against a multidrug resistant strain of Acinetobacter baumannii. Imaging, spectroscopic studies and a structural model from molecular dynamics simulations suggest that T7 acts by membrane disruption. These experiments provide the first example of using virtual screening in the field of dendrimers and show that dendrimer size does not limit the activity of AMPDs.

Author(s): Thissa Siriwardena, Alice Capecchi, Bee-Ha Gan, Xian Jin, Runze He, Dengwen Wei, Lan Ma, Thilo Köhler, Christian van Delden, Sacha Javor, Jean-Louis Reymond