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In just over a year, researchers have developed a method for making large number of peptides for use in everything from pharmaceutical to additives to prevent food spoilage.

Around the world, bacteria and fungi cause billions of dollars worth of crop losses every year, with more than 25% of plant food production lost to microbial diseases.

University of British Columbia researcher Dr. Robert Hancock and his Advanced Food and Materials Network (AFMNet) colleagues are tackling the global problem with peptides – protein fragments with powerful antimicrobial properties.

Essentially, it works like this: By taking genes – which express proteins – that occur naturally in a plant's defence system and supplementing them with the disease-fighting peptides, the plants can become more resistant to diseases that attack them.

Dr. Hancock's approach involves a new method of making large numbers of peptides with altered sequences of amino acids and screening the resulting "peptide arrays" for good antimicrobial activity. This is allowing highly effective, small peptide antibiotics to be made that could be used in everything from pharmaceuticals to additives that inhibit food spoilage.

"This process has allowed us to make an effective peptide that is only eight amino acids long," Dr. Hancock says, "which would mean it's the smallest peptide ever documented with considerable activity."

Dr. Hancock and his colleagues are making significant progress: After only one year in operation, they have developed two technologies and applied for patents for them. As well, Dr. Hancock's research is being published in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology.

"This is a lot of success to realize after just one year of collaboration," says Dr. Allan Paulson, Associate Scientific Director of AFMNet. "The team made quite a presentation at our annual meeting."

Dr. Hancock's project partner, Dr. Santosh Misra, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology from the University of Victoria, has been working on the plant side of the research, trying to help plants fight off disease.

Already, she has produced a peptide with the aid of a wound inducible expression system – a gene that is expressed by the occurrence of a wound – from poplar trees that will fight off Fusarium, a common fungal contaminant and a well-known plant pathogen that may cause various infections in humans.

While Drs. Hancock and Misra were both involved in the Canadian Bacterial Diseases Network (CBDN), which successfully completed its last year of eligible funding, it was the creation of AFMNet that made this project possible. In particular, Dr. Hancock would not have considered the possibility of using peptides as food additives.

"My research with CBDN has definitely helped us to rapidly develop this technology and patent application, but this project is entirely novel to AFMNet," says Dr. Hancock. "The network supported a productive collaboration with Santosh, as well as much-needed trainees."

The two industry partners on this project, SynGene Biotek Inc of Victoria, which Dr. Misra founded in 1996, and Inimex Pharmaceuticals, Inc, of Vancouver, which Dr. Hancock founded, provide a potential commercial outlet for the team's research.

Without the formation of AFMNet, the likelihood of industry partnerships would be slim, he says. Dr. Hancock also credits AFMNet funding for bringing postdoctoral fellow Dr. Kai Hilpert into his lab. Dr. Hilpert brought in the peptide array technology.

"We would not have started to try to make small, effective peptides without the funding from AFMNet and the NCE rationale – networking, development of intellectual property for building Canadian companies, and training of young researchers – and without the collaboration of Santosh's lab that provided a potential route to plant production of these peptides," says Dr. Hancock.

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