SARP: A comprehensive design platform for studying structure-activity relationship of antimicrobial peptides

Wide-spectrum, rapidness, and specificity in antibacteria, antivirus, and antitumor of antimicrobial peptides, allow for the development of therapeutic agents from numerous antimicrobial peptides. But there are still hemolytic activity which will do harm to multicellular organisms, therefore, molecular design have to face the problem of increasing the lytic activity against pathogen and reducing the hemolytic activity to host. In this study, we constructed a comprehensive design platform for studying structure-activity relationship of antimicrobial peptides (SARP). The platform has integrated a series of tools in order to facilitate efficient extraction of data for further analysis and design at molecular level. These tools included search engine, BLAST, web-based analysis tools, MDtools, etc. Search engine can be run through inputs of keywords or other information about the query sequences, such as ID, length, charge, hydrophobicity, family, structure and activity, etc. BLAST can be used to align the submitted sequence with the sequences in SARP database. Web-based analysis tools provide several services to perform analysis, including physical and chemical features, structure prediction and function prediction. MDtools are used to calculate several parameters, including charge, hydrophobicity, amphipathic tendency to form α-helix. All these can be obtained through web server. Therefore, the SARP platform could provides a powerful tool to serve for new drug development.