10/01/2023
One of the 1,000 reasons why I supplement Amino Acids: AA is the building block for biology: structural (collagen), functional (cell transportation channels), neurological and hormonal (Insulin is 51 Amino acids, Growth Hormone is 192). And apparently, peptides (Peptides are just Amino Acids) are a major signally mechanism for Immune system, across plants and animal kingdoms. "Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are the small molecular peptides that play a crucial role in the innate immunity of the host against a broad range of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, parasites and viruses. To date, the AMP database [Data Repository of Antimicrobial Peptides (DRAMP), http://dramp.cpu-bioinfor.org/] has reported 3791 AMPs from six kingdoms, including 431 from bacteria, 4 from archaea, 7 from protozoal, 6 from fungal, 824 from plants and 2519 from animals. Besides antibacterial activities, AMPs have been found to possess a variety of biological functions, such as immune regulation, angiogenesis, wound healing and antitumor activity [6,7,8,9]. The treatment of pathogenic bacteria has been long-time mainly relied on antibiotics. However, the emergence of drug resistance due to the single target of antibiotics, long-term and extensive utilization, is becoming a major challenge for clinical infection management. In contrast, AMPs show the advantages by acting on multiple targets on the plasma membrane and intracellular targets of pathogenic bacteria, and have potent activity on drug-resistant bacteria. Thus, AMPs provide a new alternative to antibiotics. Furthermore, the long-term chemotherapy in cancer patients not only leads to resistance to conventional cancer treatments, but also results in the susceptibility to pathogenic infection. AMPs have antibacterial and anticancer properties, and thus is a new treatment option for cancer patients. At present, the clinical application of AMPs is mainly on the treatment of pathogenic bacteria infection, wound healing and inflammation".
