Liu Runhui, Professor of East China University of science and technology research group: α / β peptide molecular brush highly effective against superbacteria

The author: Professor Liu Runhui's research group Staphylococcus aureus is a common bacteria causing infection, and the sudden emergence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has attracted extensive attention of scholars Although in the past few centuries, small molecule antibiotics have achieved great success in the fight against microbial infection, it is undeniable that due to the misuse and abuse of antibiotics worldwide, the drug resistance of microorganisms is increasing year by year It is very necessary to study the host defense peptide and its analogues Liu Runhui, Professor of East China University of science and technology, has been devoted to the study of host defense peptide analogues Recently, the research group has successfully synthesized a / β peptide molecular brush, which has a good bactericidal activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus The related results were published in Science China materials (DOI: 10.1007/s40843-018-9351-x) Polymer molecular brushes not only have special molecular morphology, but also have unique functions that linear polymers do not have For example, polymer molecular brush surface can modify groups with high density, making its mechanical and chemical properties more stable In this study, Professor Liu Runhui's research group first polymerized β - peptide skeleton by anionic ring opening initiation of β - lactam monomer, and then polymerized α - l-lys-nca by amino group on β - peptide molecular chain, and obtained molecular brush α / β cpmbs with β - peptide as skeleton and α - peptide as branch chain Then, we tested the activity of molecular brush α / β cpmbs to Staphylococcus aureus The results showed that the activity of polymer molecular brush to Staphylococcus aureus was 5 times higher than that of chain polymer, even better than vancomycin (Table 1) Fig 1 the antibacterial activity of α / β cpmbs against various MRSA (source: Science China Materials) was further studied The research team explored the sterilization mechanism of α / β cpmbs It was found by SEM that the surface morphology of Staphylococcus aureus changed obviously after being treated with α / β cpmbs for 20 min, and its cell membrane had great defects Studies have shown that, similar to host defense peptides, alpha / beta cpmbs work by destroying bacterial cell membranes (Fig 2) Fig 2 SEM characterization of morphological changes of MRSA cells after CO incubation with α / β CPMB (source: Science China Materials) This peptide molecular brush has good antibacterial activity and is not easy to produce drug resistance, so it has a good development prospect This achievement of East China University of science and technology was recently published on Science China materials (DOI: 10.1007/s40843-018-9351-x) The first author of this article is Zhang Danfeng, a postgraduate student, and the corresponding author is Professor Liu Runhui, a thousand young people.