Abstract
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) with antiviral activity (antiviral peptides: AVPs) have become a research hotspot and already show immense potential to become pharmaceutically available antiviral drugs. AVPs have exhibited huge potential in inhibiting viruses by targeting various stages of their life cycle. Insects are the most speciose group of animals that inhabit almost all ecosystems and habitats on the land and are a rich source of natural AMPs. However, insect AVP mining, functional research, and drug development are still in their infancy. This review aims to summarize the currently validated insect AVPs, explore potential new insect AVPs and to discuss their possible mechanism of synthesis and action, with a view to providing clues to unravel the mechanisms of insect antiviral immunity and to develop insect AVP-derived antiviral drugs.
Highlights
The role that insects have played as models in innate immunity research is unquestionable
Potential AVP genes of A. mellifera such as defensin 1, defensin 2, abaecin, apisimin, hymenoptaecin, and lysozyme 3 were found to be up-regulated after infection with viruses such as Deformed wing virus (DWV), Sacbrood virus (SBV), black queen cell virus (BQCV), and Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) in transcriptome data (Table 4)
Recent research found that in A. cerana the predicted AVP genes abaecin and hymenoptaecin were significantly upregulated by Chinese Sacbrood virus (CSBV) infection [85]
Summary
The role that insects have played as models in innate immunity research is unquestionable. Among hundreds of insect AMPs in the database, only 13 were associated with antiviral activity, which suggests that the research on insect AVP is still in in its infancy and requires more data. The 596 insect AMPs in dbAMP database were further used to predict antiviral activity using Meta-iAVP [37].
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