Identification, production and structural modelling of cationic antimicrobial peptides (CAMPs)

This work is part of the wide field of research on cationic antimicrobial peptides (CAMPs), molecules of great therapeutical potential for their antibacterial action, directed also against multi-drug resistant strains. By using a panel of bioinformatic, experimental and computational techniques, three novel tools were developed: (1) a scoring function, which allows the identification of putative CAMPs inside protein sequences and permits to perform strain-specific researches; (2) a fusion construct for the expression of recombinant CAMPs, which allows to prepare high purity peptides of variable length in high yields; (3) methods for the modelling of CAMPs by means of the Monte Carlo strategy and implicit solvation energy functions.