Bats are a particularly striking group of mammals, which has been translated into many legends, myths and fables. Bats are exceptionally long-lived, questioning the reported favorable association between body mass and overall life span. They are the only mammals that have established a controlled flight, and are among the only creatures that echolocate. In recent years, bats have also been linked with the production of many destructive infectious diseases in humans and other animals. Understanding how bats coexist with viruses in the absence of illness is important if we are to begin designing therapy for target viruses in humans and vulnerable livestock and pet animals. It has been argued that that the immense diversity of cationic peptides arises from their antimicrobial function to fight against the different pathogenic microbe challenges they face in each host organisms. We here aimed at the identification and characterization of bat cathelicidins using the NCBI genome database. We examined the expected antimicrobial peptides of bats and provide some structural and bioinformatic-based evidence to confirm the antimicrobial action of the predicted peptides. The cathelin-like domains of bat cathelicidin sequences allowed us to compare these sequences and to build a phylogenetic tree. We modelled the predicted active peptides from bat cathelicidins and computed the interaction of the peptides with simulated membranes. We also computed the antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral and hemolytic activities of the bat cathelicidins. Our in-silico analysis was consistent with the net charge and secondary structure of each peptide, since those peptides with lower net charge and/or lower helicity showed lesser extent of interaction with simulated membranes.<br/>Attempting to understand immune responses in reservoir hosts that dictate the relationship between virus persistence and immunopathology could help in the identification of human viral pathogenesis and reveal possible targets for therapeutic intervention. We hope that our study could provide scientists with several opportunities to investigate the function of antimicrobial peptides in these species.

In silico analysis of genome predicted bat cathelicidins

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.