The search for novel compounds to combat multi-resistant bacterial infections includes exploring the potency of antimicrobial peptides and derivatives thereof. Complementary to high-throughput screening techniques, biophysical and biochemical studies of the biological activity of these compounds enable deep insight, which can be exploited in designing antimicrobial peptides with improved efficacy. This approach requires the combination of several techniques to study the effect of such peptides on both bacterial cells and simple mimics of their cell envelope, such as lipid-only vesicles. These efforts carry the challenge of bridging results across techniques and sample systems, including the proper choice of membrane mimics. This review describes some important concepts toward the development of potent antimicrobial peptides and how they translate to frequently applied experimental techniques, along with an outline of the biophysics pertaining to the killing mechanism of antimicrobial peptides.

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将抗菌肽的生物活性与其分子作用模式联系起来的实验概念。

寻找对抗多重耐药细菌感染的新型化合物包括探索抗菌肽及其衍生物的效力。作为对高通量筛选技术的补充，对这些化合物的生物活性的生物物理和生化研究可实现深入洞察，可用于设计具有更高功效的抗菌肽。这种方法需要结合多种技术来研究此类肽对细菌细胞及其细胞包膜的简单模拟物（例如仅脂质囊泡）的影响。这些努力带来了跨技术和样品系统桥接结果的挑战，包括正确选择膜模拟物。