Determination of the disulfide array of the first inducible antifungal peptide from insects: drosomycin from Drosophila melanogaster
- 14 October 1996
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in FEBS Letters
- Vol. 395 (1), 6-10
- https://doi.org/10.1016/0014-5793(96)00992-1
Abstract
Drosomycin is a 44-residue antifungal peptide with four intramolecular disulfide bridges which have been isolated from immune-challenged Drosophila. To produce adequate amounts of this peptide for 3D-structure analysis, studies on the mode of action and activity spectrum, we expressed a synthetic cDNA in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. For this purpose, we used the mating factor alpha gene and concomitantly overexpressed the KEX2 gene to increase the yield of fully processed drosomycin. Using a combination of Edman degradation and mass spectrometry, we show that drosomycin shares the same array of intramolecular disulfide bridges than plant defensins, in addition to their sequence similarities.Keywords
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