Folding profiles of antimicrobial scorpion venom-derived peptides on hydrophobic surfaces: a molecular dynamics study

Most helical antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are usually unfolded in aqueous solution; however they acquire their secondary structure in the presence of a hydrophobic environment such as lipid membranes. Being the biological membranes the main target of many AMPs it is necessary to understand their way of action. Pandinin 2 (Pin2) is an alpha-helical AMP isolated from the venom of the African scorpion Pandinus imperator which shows high antimicrobial activity against Gram-positive bacteria and it is less active against Gram-negative bacteria, nevertheless, it has strong hemolytic activity. Its chemically synthesized Pin2GVG analog has low hemolytic activity while keeping its antimicrobial activity. With the aim of exploring the partition and subsequent folding of these peptides, in this work we report the results of extensive molecular dynamics simulations of Pin2 and Pin2GVG peptides in the presence of 2 hydrophobic environments such as dodecyl-phosphocholine (DPC) micelle and 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocoline (POPC) membrane. Our results indicate that Pin2 folds in DPC with a 79% of alpha-helical content, which is in agreement with the experimental results, while in POPC it has 62.5% of alpha-helical content. On the other hand, Pin2GVG presents a higher percentage of alpha-helical structure in POPC and a smaller content in DPC when compared with Pin2. These results can help to better choose the starting structures in future molecular dynamics simulations of AMPs, because these peptides can adopt slightly different conformations depending on the hydrophobic environment.Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.