The Role of Metals in Anti-Infective Agents

The indiscriminate use of antibiotics has led to a huge increase in antibiotic resistance, encouraging the scientific community towards the search for new classes of antibiotics. In this respect, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) represent a skilled class of therapeutic agents, due to their broad activity, rapid killing, low bacterial resistance, and ease of synthesis. Metal ions, which have a long history of antimicrobial activity, have received great attention as potential antimicrobial agents, too. The combined use of metal-AMP could prove to be an unexplored class of antibiotics, useful to combat bacterial, parasitic, fungal, or viral infections.This Research Topic aims to describe and discuss the recent advances in the discovery, characterization, development, and application of metal-AMP-based anti-infective agents, covering bacterial, fungal, viral, and parasitic infections. The aim is to stimulate research interest in this field, starting from the knowledge of the structural characteristics of the metal-peptide coordination up to recent applications as the incorporation of metal binding units in peptide sequences. Topic editors: Danilo Ciccone Miguel, Lucia Falcigno Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/68869/the-role-of-metals-in-anti-infective-agents