Abstract
The efficacies of many antimicrobial peptides are greatly reduced under high salt concentrations, therefore limiting their use as pharmaceutical agents. Here, we describe a strategy to boost salt resistance and serum stability of short antimicrobial peptides by adding the nonnatural bulky amino acid-naphthylalanine to their termini. The activities of the short salt-sensitive tryptophan-rich peptide S1 were diminished at high salt concentrations, whereas the activities of its-naphthylalanine end-tagged variants were less affected. © 2013, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.