Novel antimicrobial anionic cecropins from the spruce budworm feature a <scp>poly‐L</scp> ‐aspartic acid C‐terminus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Cecropins form a family of amphipathic α‐helical cationic peptides with broad‐spectrum antibacterial properties and potent anticancer activity. The emergence of bacteria and cancer cells showing resistance to cationic antimicrobial peptides (CAMPs) has fostered a search for new, more selective and more effective alternatives to CAMPs. With this goal in mind, we looked for cecropin homologs in the genome and transcriptome of the spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumiferana . Not only did we find paralogs of the conventional cationic cecropins (Cfcec + ), our screening also led to the identification of previously uncharacterized anionic cecropins (Cfcec − ), featuring a poly‐ l ‐aspartic acid C‐terminus. Comparative peptide analysis indicated that the C‐terminal helix of Cfcec − is amphipathic, unlike that of Cfcec + , which is hydrophobic. Interestingly, molecular dynamics simulations pointed to the lower conformational flexibility of Cfcec − peptides, relative to that of Cfcec + . Phylogenetic analysis suggests that the evolution of distinct Cfcec + and Cfcec − peptides may have resulted from an ancient duplication event within the Lepidoptera. Finally, we found that both anionic and cationic cecropins contain a BH3‐like motif (G‐[KQR]‐[HKQNR]‐[IV]‐[KQR]) that could interact with Bcl‐2, a protein involved in apoptosis; this observation is congruent with previous reports indicating that cecropins induce apoptosis. Altogether, our observations suggest that cecropins may provide templates for the development of new anticancer drugs. We also estimated the antibacterial activity of Cfcec‐2 and a ∆Cfce‐2 peptide as AMPs by testing directly their ability in inhibiting bacterial growth in a disk diffusion assay and their potential for development of novel therapeutics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".