Strategies and opportunities for engineering antifungal peptides for therapeutic applications.

Antifungal peptides (AFPs) are widely described as promising prospects to treat and prevent fungal infections, though they are far less studied than their antibacterial counterparts. Although promising, AFPs have practical limitations that have hindered their use as therapeutics. Rational design and combinatorial engineering are powerful protein engineering strategies with much potential to address the limitations of AFPs by designing peptides with improved physiochemical and biological characteristics. We examine how rational design and combinatorial engineering approaches have already been used to improve the properties of AFPs and propose key opportunities for applying these strategies to push the design and application of AFPs forward.

A New Perspective to Tribocharging: Could Tribocharging Lead to the Development of a Non-Destructive Approach for Process Monitoring and Quality Control of Powders?

This study explores a new perspective on triboelectrification that could potentially lead to the development of a non-destructive approach for the rapid characterization of powders. Sieved yellow pea powders at various particle sizes and protein contents were used as a model system for the experimental charge measurements of the triboelectrified powders. A tribocharging model based on the prominent condenser model was combined with a Eulerian-Lagrangian computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to simulate particle tribocharging in particle-laden flows. Further, an artificial neural network model was developed to predict particle-wall collision numbers based on a database obtained through CFD simulations. The tribocharging and CFD models were coupled with the experimental tribocharging data to estimate the contact potential difference of powders, which is a function of contact surfaces' work functions and depends on the chemical composition of powders. The experimentally measured charge-to-mass ratios were linearly related to the calculated contact potential differences for samples with different protein contents, indicating a potential approach for the chemical characterization of powders.

Functional properties of navy bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) protein concentrates obtained by pneumatic tribo-electrostatic separation.

A sustainable, chemical-free dry tribo-electrostatic separation approach was employed to fractionate navy bean flour. The resulting protein-enriched fractions had 36-38% protein on a moisture free basis, accounting for 43% of the total available protein. SDS-PAGE analysis of the dry-enriched protein fractions showed a similar protein profile to that of the original navy bean flour. The functional properties of these fractions were examined and compared with the commercial soybean protein concentrate as well as navy bean protein isolate obtained by a conventional wet fractionation process. These electrostatically separated protein fractions exhibited superior solubility at their intrinsic pH as well as superior emulsion stability (ES), foam expansion (FE) and foam volume stability (FVS) compared to the wet-fractionated navy bean protein isolate that was almost depleted of albumins, exhibiting poor solubility and foaming properties. These results suggest electrostatic separation as a promising route to deliver functional protein concentrates as novel food formulation ingredients.