Engineering Commons^™

Outlining The Biocidal Mechanisms Of Synthetic Antimicrobial Peptide Mimics, Tyler D. Brown

Honors Theses

Each day, antibiotic resistance affects the livelihood of individuals worldwide, especially in relation to hospital-acquired diseases. In an effort to combat this resistance, antimicrobial peptides, small biopolymers produced naturally by multicellular organisms, can be used to selectively eliminate bacteria and have demonstrated great potential as alternatives to conventional antibiotics. Many naturally-occurring antimicrobial peptides possess high concentrations of lysine and arginine amino acid residues, which are protonated and positively-charged at physiological pH. Herein, we describe the design and synthesis of antimicrobial peptide mimics, using amino acid mimics. N-3-aminopropyl methacrylamide (APMA) and 3-guanidinopropyl methacrylamide (GPMA) monomers mimic the amino acid residues lysine …