Antiviral Peptides Potentially Useful Against STDs.

2001 OCT 18 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- In a surprising find, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have uncovered the antiviral properties of an obscure class of peptides that may someday provide a powerful way to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Led by professor of ophthalmology and medical microbiology Curtis Brandt, the team of University of Wisconsin - Madison researchers discovered that several so-called membrane transit peptides - parts of certain protein molecules with a special ability to traverse membranes - prevent cell infection by three major STD-causing viruses: herpes simplex virus, papilloma virus and HIV.

Brandt originally investigated the transit peptides as a means to usher other promising, but poorly penetrating, antiviral molecules across the plasma membrane into cells.

"But we never got that far," he says, "because it turns out that the membrane-transiting peptides themselves are antivirals. This is an excellent case of scientific serendipity."

The peptides are synthetic but are based on natural transit peptide sequences from diverse sources, including the fruit fly Drosophila and HIV itself. Although Brandt ...