Abstract
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are broad spectrum antibiotics that utilize electrostatics to selectively target bacteria. Like every antibiotic, AMPs need a minimum concentration (known as MIC) to effectively inhibit growth of a bacterial population. Despite our molecular knowledge on AMPs, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the AMP's dynamics at the cellular and the population level. In this talk, I present our recent findings that MIC of AMPs is strongly dependent on the cell density, even in dilute cultures where there is no direct cell-to-cell interactions. This suggests that individual cells may adsorb a large number of AMPs that considerably reduces their concentration in the solution. To further investigate this, we used a live single-cell imaging platform to track fluorescently tagged AMPs and the time evolution of their translocation into bacteria. Our single-cell analysis show that bacteria not only adsorb a large fraction of AMPs from the culture, but dead cells also retain them almost permanently which sequesters AMPs availability for attacking more cells.
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