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Description
Introduction: Antibiotics help our body combat pathogenic bacteria. Bacteria can adapt physiologically to antibiotic treatment as well as evolve resistance to antibiotics over time. Growing bacterial resistance has led to a need for new antibiotics, including the use of antimicrobial peptides. With the view of developing a successful antimicrobial peptide, the project aims to use transcriptomics to better understand the bacterial response to the specific antimicrobial peptide wrwycr [tryptophan (w)-arginine (r)-tryptophan (w)-tyrosine (y)-cysteine (c)-arginine(r)] which has the potential to disrupt the homologous recombination-dependent DNA repair mechanism of Escherichia coli K-12 sub-strain MG1655 by binding to and stabilizing Holliday junction intermediates of this pathway. Methods: The bioinformatics data analysis was conducted on the data received from the Illumina MiSeq sequencer. The sequence read data files were used for read mapping using the Bowtie software and Deseq (R package) to calculate differential gene expression. Results: The data showed that genetic pathways involved in extracytoplamic, osmotic and acidic stress were predominantly affected by treatment of MG1655 with peptide wrwycr. Some of the regulated genes have unknown function. Their modulation in response to peptide treatment will help in assigning them functions as part of pathways with genes whose functions has been well-worked out. Discussion: The future directions of the projects include focusing on each of the genes and their functional role in the bacteria. The analysis of the pathways and the role played by the genes in question would help us understand how the peptide affects cells and mediates killing.
