Project description:The recent increase in extensively drug resistant bacterial pathogens and the associated increase of morbidity and mortality demonstrate the immediate need for new antibiotic backbones with novel mechanisms of action. Here, we report the development of the PepSAVI-MS pipeline for bioactive peptide discovery. This highly versatile platform employs bioinformatics, statistics, and mass spectrometry to identify bioactive peptide targets from complex biological samples. We validate the use of this platform through the successful identification of known bioactive peptides from a botanical species, Viola odorata. Using this pipeline, we have widened the known antimicrobial spectrum for V. odorata cyclotides, including antibacterial activity of cycloviolacin O2 against E. faecium and A. baumannii. We further demonstrate the broad applicability of the platform through the identification of novel anticancer activities for cycloviolacins by their cytotoxicity against ovarian, breast and prostate cancer cell lines.
Project description:To find the possible molecular mechanism of myopia protection by violet light, we performed expression microarray analysis of chick chorioretinal tissue. The mRNA were obtained at day 13 from the following four groups: control eyes with or without violet light exposure and covered eyes with or without violet light exposure, and then the gene expression pattern was compared among them. Principle component analysis, which is to find major patterns of variability in gene expression, was performed and we found that the largest gene population (PC1, positive: n = 138, negative: n = 292) was affected by violet light treatment. On the other hand, the second largest gene population (PC2, positive: n = 120, negative: n = 23) was affected in the eyes covered with a plastic lens. The previously reported myopia-related genes such as Bmp2, Ednrb, Fgf2, Igf1, Il18, Irbp, Lumican, Sfrp1, Tgfb1, Vegfa, Vip, and Wnt2b were not found in the PC1 group in vivo, which indicates that they responded less to violet light. In the PC1 group, only one myopia protective gene, EGR1 (ZENK, zif268), was found among the previously reported myopia related genes.