Applied Microbiology: Open Access
Open Access
ISSN: 2471-9315
+44 1300 500008
ISSN: 2471-9315
+44 1300 500008
Liliana Munoz Molina, Alexander Guevara Agudelo, Luz Mary Salazar Pulido, Jeannette Navarrette and Gladys Pinilla
Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, Colombia
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Appli Micro Open Access
Biofilms, multicellular communities formed by bacteria causes the majority of infections and exhibit increased resistant to antibiotics. Staphylococcus spp. is a clinical pathogen that forms biofilm infections on nearly all types of medical devices and no antimicrobials have been developed specifically to treat biofilms yet. Synthetic peptides with anti-biofilm activity represent a novel approach to treat biofilm infections. In this context, it is necessary to implement strategies to neutralize the ability of biofilm formation. Therefore, short analogs of LL-37, a pleiotropic peptide with antibiofilm activity were designed and synthesized to try to maintain/improve the activity of the native molecule against biofilm, their helical structure and the possible interaction with the bacterial membrane. A bioinformatics tool was used to predict important antimicrobial residues and generate fragments of the complete sequence. Four different peptides were manually synthesized using F-MOC technique and characterized by RP-HPLC and MALDI-TOF. The biofilm forming capability of Staphylococcus was linked to the presence of the ica operon and the amount of biofilm formation measured by the crystal violet (CV) adherence assay. The antibiofilm activity of the peptides was tested; the results showed an inhibition concentration of 5 uM using a flow cell system by confocal microscopy and in between 25-50 uM by using CV assay. Staphylococcus spp. was characterized for its ica status using PCR and its biofilm forming ability over 3 days. According to the results, these peptides represent a promising alternative for the treatment of biofilm-associated infections or could be combined with conventional antibiotics.
Email: lcmunoz@unicolmayor.edu.co