Dipartimento di Scienze Biochimiche A. Rossi Fanelli, Università La Sapienza, Roma, Italy.
Three antimicrobial peptides were isolated from skin secretion of the European frog, Rana esculenta. Two of them show similarity to brevinin-1 and brevinin-2, respectively, two antimicrobial peptides recently isolated from a Japanese frog [Morikawa, N., Hagiwara, K. and Nakajima, T. (1992) Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 189, 184-190]. The third one, named esculentin, is 46 residues long and represents a different type of peptide. All these peptides have as a common motif an intramolecular disulfide bridge located at the COOH-terminal end. The peptides from R. esculenta show distinctive antibacterial activity against representative Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacterial species. In particular, esculentin is the most active against Staphylococcus aureus, and has a much lower hemolytic activity.