- December 02, 2025
- By Kimbra Cutlip
Researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Institutes of Health have discovered an entirely new class of antimicrobial peptides that could point the way to developing antibiotic alternatives for treating dangerous infectious diseases. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Antimicrobial peptides, or AMPs, are small proteins formed by nearly all living things that help them fight off infections from microbes like bacteria and fungi. The mechanisms AMPs use to kill an attacking microbe have long interested scientists, who hope to adapt the same strategies for use in medications. Finding the new type of peptide opens an unexplored direction for antimicrobial research.
“These new AMPs are very small and don’t look like what we would expect, so we’ve missed this entire category of natural antibiotics for years,” said Seth Dickey, assistant professor of veterinary medicine at UMD and lead author of the study. “But it turns out they are very powerful against Gram-positive bacteria, including drug-resistant strains like MRSA and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus.”
Gram-positive bacteria are a class of bacteria that typically respond well to antibiotics but are responsible for many deaths from bacterial infections. Additionally, overuse of antibiotics has meant many strains are developing resistance. “These new AMPs, which we named TMcins, kill bacteria in a new way, so they provide new and exciting ideas to treat bacterial infections,” Dickey said.
In addition to showing that TMcins could kill several dangerous Gram-positive pathogens, the researchers found that the bacteria that produces them also produces companion molecules that help “chaperone” the TMcins as they move through their environment.