Abstract
Bats are unique in their potential to serve as reservoir hosts for intracellular pathogens. Recently, the impact of COVID-19 has relegated bats from biomedical darkness to the frontline of public health as bats are the natural reservoir of many viruses, including SARS-Cov-2. Many bat genomes have been sequenced recently, and sequences coding for antimicrobial peptides are available in the public databases. Here we provide a structural analysis of genome-predicted bat cathelicidins as components of their innate immunity. A total of 32 unique protein sequences were retrieved from the NCBI database. Interestingly, some bat species contained more than one cathelicidin. We examined the conserved cysteines within the cathelin-like domain and the peptide portion of each sequence and revealed phylogenetic relationships and structural dissimilarities. The antibacterial, antifungal, and antiviral activity of peptides was examined using bioinformatic tools. The peptides were modeled and subjected to docking analysis with the region binding domain (RBD) region of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein. The appearance of multiple forms of cathelicidins verifies the complex microbial challenges encountered by these species. Learning more about antiviral defenses of bats and how they drive virus evolution will help scientists to investigate the function of antimicrobial peptides in these species.
Highlights
We examine in this report the predicted cathelicidin antimicrobial peptides of bats and provide some structural, phylogenetic, and in silico analysis of the predicted peptides
To ascertain whether the number of cathelicidins found in bat species was somehow related to their available genome sequences, we searched the NCBI for the corresponding genome project and compared with the median genome length and protein counts
We could see that for the genome of Molossus molossus, with a median length of 2315 Mb and 53,797 protein counts, there is only one cathelicidin, whereas for other bat genomes; such as Myotis lucifigus, with a median length of 2034 Mb and 43,106 protein counts, we could find four distinct cathelicidins
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The planet is facing a global viral pandemic with catastrophic implications for human life and socio-economic activity. This pandemic is triggered by a zoonotic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, which is presumed to occur in bats and could have been transmitted to humans by an intermediary host animal. Coronaviruses (CoVs) are RNA viruses that cause respiratory and enteric diseases with varying pathogenicity in humans and animals
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