Engineering Commons^™

De Novo Design Of Biomimetic Antimicrobial Polymers, Gregory N. Tew, Dahui Liu, Bin Chen, Robert J. Doerksen, Justin Kaplan, Patrick J. Carroll, Michael L. Klein, William F. Degrado

Gregory N. Tew

The design of polymers and oligomers that mimic the complex structures and remarkable biological properties of proteins is an important endeavor with both fundamental and practical implications. Recently, a number of nonnatural peptides with designed sequences have been elaborated to provide biologically active structures; in particular, facially amphiphilic peptides built from β-amino acids have been shown to mimic both the structures as well as the biological function of natural antimicrobial peptides such as magainins and cecropins. However, these natural peptides as well as their β-peptide analogues are expensive to prepare and difficult to produce on a large scale, limiting their …