Antimicrobial Peptides: Architects of Microbial Community Dynamics

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are short, biologically active sequences encoded across virtually all bacterial proteomes. While they have long been studied for their antimicrobial activity in clinical and biotechnological contexts, their ecological role in shaping natural microbial communities remains poorly understood. Emerging evidence indicates that AMPs act as key chemical mediators of microbial competition, influencing which taxa establish, persist, or decline within a community. Sequence homology and dissimilarity between AMP producers and neighbouring strains appear to confer differential immunity or vulnerability, suggesting that AMP repertoires actively sculpt microbial composition across time and space. Recent advances in metagenomics, metaproteomics, network inference, and machine learning now make it feasible to detect, classify, and trace the functional impact of AMPs at community scale, opening a new window onto the rules that govern microbiome assembly and stability.This Research Topic aims to consolidate current understanding of AMPs as architects of microbial community dynamics, moving beyond their canonical role as antimicrobial agents toward a systems-level view of their ecological and evolutionary functions. We seek contributions that test mechanistic hypotheses about how AMPs drive competition, coexistence, and succession within complex microbial assemblages. Of particular interest are studies that integrate computational prediction with experimental validation to link AMP sequence features to community-level outcomes, that resolve the spatial and temporal dynamics of AMP activity across diverse ecosystems, or that exploit AMP biology for targeted modulation of microbial communities through synthetic and engineering approaches. By bringing together microbial ecologists, computational biologists, biochemists, and synthetic biologists, the collection seeks to define the principles by which peptide-mediated interactions shape microbiome structure and function, and to translate those principles into tools for biotechnology, environmental management, and human and animal health.We welcome Original Research, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Methods, Hypothesis and Theory, and Perspective articles addressing topics including, but not limited to:• Genomic and proteomic discovery of novel AMPs in environmental, host-associated, or engineered microbiomes.• Mechanisms by which AMP sequence homology or dissimilarity governs interbacterial competition and immunity.• Spatial and temporal dynamics of AMP expression and activity within communities.• Network and machine learning approaches to predict AMP-mediated interactions.• Engineering of AMPs and AMP-producing strains for community modulation, bioremediation, or therapeutic applications.• High-throughput dereplication, benchmarking, prioritisation, and experimental validation of candidate AMPs generated by AI and machine-learning pipelinesIn line with the scope of Systems Microbiology, purely descriptive amplicon-based surveys (e.g. 16S rRNA, 18S rRNA, ITS) without a clear hypothesis, experimental component, and demonstrable insight into the system or process under study fall outside the remit of this collection and will not be considered. Topic editors: Liang Wang, Cong Ma, Marcos Quintela-Baluja Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81121/antimicrobial-peptides-architects-of-microbial-community-dynamics