October 2019 Meeting

Speaker: Leslie Hicks, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Topic: Investigating plant-derived antimicrobial peptides using PepSAVI-MS

Date: Monday, October 21st, 2019

Time: 6:15 pm Dinner, 7:15 pm Presentation

Location: Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, Inc. Training Center 7100 Riverwood Drive, Columbia, MD 21046 (Directions)

Dinner: Please RSVP to Meghan Burke (meghan.burke@nist.gov) by Friday, October 18th if you will be attending the dinner.

Abstract: As current methods for antibiotic drug discovery are being outpaced by the rise of antimicrobial resistance, new methods and innovative technologies are crucial to replenish our dwindling arsenal of antimicrobial therapeutics. While natural products are a well-studied source of biologically active small molecules, peptidyl factors contributing to their medicinal properties remain largely unexplored. To this end, we have developed the PepSAVI-MS to identify bioactive peptide targets from complex biological samples. The developed platform is highly versatile as it is adaptable to any natural product source of peptides and can test against diverse physiological targets, including bacteria, fungi, and cancer cells for which there is a developed bioassay. As such, we demonstrated extension of this pipeline to fungal and bacterially-sourced AMPs and are beginning to probe the vast array of botanical natural product sources to prioritize highly active species for downstream analysis.