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A peptide antibiotic from human skin

Nature volume 387, page 861 (1997)Cite this article

Abstract

To avoid opportunistic infections, plants and animals have developed antimicrobial peptides in their epithelia that can form pores in the cytoplasmic membrane of microorganisms1. After contact with microorganisms, vertebrate skin2, trachea and tongue epithelia3 are rich sources of peptide antibiotics1, which may explain the unexpected resistance of these tissues to infection. Here we report that human skin is protected in a similar way by an inducible, transcriptionally regulated, antibiotic peptide, which resembles those in other mammals.

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Figure 1: The deduced amino-acid sequence (single-letter code) of the hBD-2 precursor based on the complementary DNA sequence obtained from humakeratinocytes, with the sequences of bovine tracheal antimicrobial peptide (TAP), bovine lingual antimicrobial peptide (LAP) and human β-defensin-1 (hBD-1), and the β-defensin consensus sequence.
Figure 2: hBD-2 mRNA is upregulated by contact with different microorganisms (upper panel) and constitutively expressed in organs other than skin (lower panel).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Dermatology, University of Kiel, 24105 Kiel, Germany

    J. Harder, J. Bartels, E Christophers & J.-M. Schröder

Authors
  1. J. Harder
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  2. J. Bartels
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  3. E Christophers
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  4. J.-M. Schröder
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Harder, J., Bartels, J., Christophers, E. et al. A peptide antibiotic from human skin. Nature 387, 861 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/43088

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