Typologie d'actualités: Team Molecular, Structural and Chemical Biology

A butterfly peptide to combat resistant fungi

A promising avenue for better crop protection and perhaps even for treating certain diseases, as reported by CNRS Chimie.

Fungal infections represent a major global health problem, with increasing resistance to currently available antifungal molecules. Targeting glucosylceramides (GlcCer), which are functionally essential glycosphingolipids present in fungal membranes, represents a promising strategy for the development of new antifungal agents.

GlcCer are associated with the antifungal activity of certain antimicrobial peptides found in plants and insects, known as defensins. The ETD151 peptide, optimised from butterfly defensins, is active against a range of fungal pathogens of interest to human health and agriculture. For example, the researchers have previously shown that ETD151 induces a multifaceted mechanism of action on Botrytis cinerea, a multi-resistant phytopathogenic fungus used here as a model (Aumer et al. 2020).

This multifaceted mechanism of action makes ETD151 a promising candidate for combating fungal resistance. The researchers took up the challenge of identifying its molecular target. They showed that the ETD151 peptide binds at the molecular level to GlcCer and localises preferentially to the membrane, where it induces various toxic effects. Identifying its molecular target and understanding the mode of action of ETD151 opens up new prospects for human health and crop protection.

Reference :
O. Kharrat, Y. Yamaryo-Botté, R. Nasreddine, S. Voisin, T. Aumer, B.P.A. Cammue, J. Madinier, T. Knobloch, K. Thevissen, R. Nehmé, V. Aucagne, C. Botté, P. Bulet, & C. Landon.
The antimicrobial activity of ETD151 defensin is dictated by the presence of glycosphingolipids in the targeted organisms.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (2025) 122 (7) e2415524122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2415524122.

Marcin Suskiewicz, winner of funding from the Human Frontier Science Program, a prestigious international organisation

The information contained in genes is translated by proteins called transcription factors, which form the basis of cellular life.  These proteins can be subsequently modified to adopt new properties. Post-translational modification of proteins is a natural mechanism for regulating the cell, but one that still raises many questions among researchers.

Marcin Suskiewicz is interested in how transcription factors work.

Read more on the CNRS Chimie website (in french).

Collaboration with Béatrice Vallée, co-leader of the Team Cell Signaling and Neurofibromatosis

Bojan Žunar, assistant professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology in the Laboratory for Biochemistry is visiting the team Cell Signaling and Neurofibromatosis for 2 months.

Bojan is well known at the CBM as he used to be a post-doc fellow in 2020-2021 in the same team.

Now, he is a group leader, and he was awarded a European Grant (https://croestro.eu/, NextGenerationUE), allowing him and members of his group to come to the CBM to perform experiments and to take advantage of Mo2Ving imaging facilities.

His fields of interest concern synthetic biology and yeast engineering in order to design humanized biosensors and innovative microbial factories for research, environmental and manufacturing purposes.