Quote:
slcimmuno Member Level Saturday, 06/24/17 02:06:46 PM
Re: farrell90 post# 187203
Post # of 187257

Zasloff gets credit for the lightbulb moment with his frog peptide...

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/31/us/curiosit...otics.html

... but DeGrado is the one whose doodle on a scrap of paper might go down as the bigger insight -- the possibility of making synthetic versions of AMPs much better than natural ones.

Brilacidin's potential therapeutic application is more than Bigly -- it's Ginormous.

//

In 2000 DeGrado became curious about what was the simplest possible molecule that could mimic this membrane-infiltrating ability. He realized that the key was a two-sided structure. One side is attracted to negatively charged molecules on the surface of bacterial membranes. This, among other things, helps it to distinguish bacteria from human membranes, which have a less negative charge. The other side of the antibiotic contains an oily surface that is attracted to the greasy interior portion of the membrane.

Doodling on a scrap of paper with postdoctoral student Gregory Tew (now a professor at the University of Massachusetts), DeGrado came up with a crescent-shaped molecule that was somewhat similar to the polymer Kevlar used in bulletproof vests. He wasn't sure it would work, so he took it across the campus to molecular modeling expert Michael Klein. Klein took one look and was convinced that DeGrado was on to something. "I was so excited that I got [DeGrado] to sign and date the paper and gave it to my secretary" for safekeeping, recalls Klein, now at Temple University.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlangreth/2...-bacteria/