Recent advances in antimicrobial peptide-based therapy.

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a group of polypeptide chains that have the property to target and kill a myriad of microbial organisms including viruses, bacteria, protists, etc. The first discovered AMP was named gramicidin, an extract of aerobic soil bacteria. Further studies discovered that these peptides are present not only in prokaryotes but in eukaryotes as well. They play a vital role in human innate immunity and wound repair. Consequently, they have maintained a high level of intrigue among scientists in the field of immunology, especially so with the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens decreasing the reliability of antibiotics in healthcare. While AMPs have promising potential to substitute for common antibiotics, their use as effective replacements is barred by certain limitations. First, they have the potential to be cytotoxic to human cells. Second, they are unstable in the blood due to action by various proteolytic agents and ions that cause their degradation. This review provides an overview of the mechanism of AMPs, their limitations, and developments in recent years that provide techniques to overcome those limitations. We also discuss the advantages and drawbacks of AMPs as a replacement for antibiotics as compared to other alternatives such as synthetically modified bacteriophages, traditional medicine, and probiotics.

Confronting antibiotic-resistant pathogens: Distinctive drug delivery potentials of progressive nanoparticles.

Antimicrobial resistance arises over time, usually due to genetic modifications. Global observations of high resistance rates to popular antibiotics used to treat common bacterial diseases, such as diarrhea, STIs, sepsis, and urinary tract infections, indicate that our supply of effective antibiotics is running low. The mechanisms of action of several antibiotic groups are covered in this review. Antimicrobials disrupt the development and metabolism of bacteria, leading to their eventual death. However, in recent years, microorganisms become resistant to the drugs. Bacteria encode resistant genes against antibiotics and inhibit the function of antibiotics by reducing the uptake of drugs, modifying the enzyme's active site, synthesizing enzymes to degrade antibiotics, and changing the structure of ribosomal subunits. Additionally, the methods of action of resistant bacteria against different kinds of antibiotics as well as their modes of action are discussed. Besides, the resistant pathogenic bacteria which get the most priority by World Health Organisation (WHO) for synthesizing new drugs, have also been incorporated. To overcome antimicrobial resistance, nanomaterials are used to increase the efficacy of antimicrobial drugs. Metallic, inorganic, and polymer-based nanoparticles once conjugated with antibacterial drugs, exhibit synergistic effects by increasing the efficacy of the drugs by inhibiting bacterial growth. Nanomaterial's toxic properties are proportional to their concentrations. Higher concentration nanomaterials are more toxic to the cells. In this review, the toxic properties of nanomaterials on lung cells, lymph nodes, and neuronal cells are also summarized.

One-dimensional Lévy quasicrystal.

Space-fractional quantum mechanics (SFQM) is a generalization of the standard quantum mechanics when the Brownian trajectories in Feynman path integrals are replaced by Lévy flights. We introduce Lévy quasicrystal by discretizing the space-fractional Schrödinger equation using the Grünwald-Letnikov derivatives and adding on-site quasiperiodic potential. The discretized version of the usual Schrödinger equation maps to the Aubry-André (AA) Hamiltonian, which supports localization-delocalization transition even in one dimension. We find the similarities between Lévy quasicrystal and the AA model with power-law hopping, and show that the Lévy quasicrystal supports a delocalization-localization transition as one tunes the quasiperiodic potential strength and shows the coexistence of localized and delocalized states separated by mobility edge. Hence, a possible realization of SFQM in optical experiments should be a new experimental platform to test the predictions of AA models in the presence of power-law hopping.