Resurrected 160-million-year-old mammalian peptides show potency against drug-resistant bacteria

Scientists have applied ancestral sequence reconstruction — a technique that uses computational phylogenetics to infer and then synthesise the protein sequences of ancient organisms — to recover antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) from mammals that lived approximately 160 million years ago. The study, reported by ScienceDaily, found that several of these resurrected peptides displayed greater potency against drug-resistant bacteria than their modern human counterparts.

Antimicrobial peptides are short proteins produced by immune systems as a first line of defence against pathogens. They are of significant research interest as potential leads for new antibiotics, particularly given the escalating global threat from antimicrobial resistance. The evolutionary logic behind testing ancient variants is that peptides from earlier mammalian lineages may have been optimised for a different and in some respects more diverse microbial environment, and may therefore carry structural features that modern versions have lost.

The researchers say their findings provide new structural and functional clues for the rational design of AMP-based therapeutic candidates. The work sits at the intersection of evolutionary biology and infectious disease research and is relevant to researchers in genomics, molecular evolution, and antimicrobial pharmacology. The underlying journal, lead authors, and institution are not specified in the ScienceDaily lede; those details will be available in the primary publication. No clinical applications are described in the source material.