Abstract
Pine needles are used in several East Asian countries as food or traditional medicine. It contains functional components that exhibit a wide spectrum of pharmacological effects such as antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-diabetic, and anti-inflammatory activities. We determined and characterized the novel antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) isolated from Pinus densiflora Sieb. et Zucc. The four active pine-needle (PN) peptides showed antimicrobial activity against foodborne bacteria with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values within the range of 8–128 μg/ml. PN peptides showed no detectable hemolytic activity or cytotoxicity at the antimicrobial concentrations. The N-terminal amino acid sequence of the PN5 was identified using Edman degradation and Antimicrobial Peptide Database (APD) homology analysis showed that it was not identical to any other plant peptide. This suggests that PN5 can serve as an alternative therapeutic agent to be used in the food industry.
Highlights
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) play an important element in the innate immune system ranging from bacteria to plants, mammals, and insects (Hancock et al, 2016; Haney et al, 2019; Sathoff and Samac, 2019)
The antimicrobial activity of the dialyzed samples was tested against pathogenic bacteria (E. coli, S. aureus, P. aeruginosa, S. aureus, and S. epidermidis) and bacterial strains that cause food poisoning (S. typhimurium and L. monocytogenes)
After confirming the antimicrobial activity against L. monocytogenes and S. typhimurium of the ultrafiltered fractions ≤10 kDa, we found that these samples retained the same activity as the dialyzed samples (Supplementary Figure S3)
Summary
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) play an important element in the innate immune system ranging from bacteria to plants, mammals, and insects (Hancock et al, 2016; Haney et al, 2019; Sathoff and Samac, 2019). Plants produced are short AMPs with a molecular mass less than 10 kDa; structurally, these are amphipathic and generally positively charged molecules at physiologically neutral pH values. They primarily play defensive roles such as acting as membrane-active antifungal, antibacterial, and antiviral agents (Tam et al, 2015; Dhama et al, 2018)
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