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The long term goal of this program is to develop safe and effective peptide-based antimicrobials that can be used to replace chemical food preservatives, or to shorten processing time thereby improving the sensory and nutritional quality of foods.
Lantibiotics, which are small, high modified peptides naturally produced by a wide variety of gram-positive bacteria, have a long history of use in the food industry and are ideally suited for this purpose. The emergence of methods for engineering the structures of these lantibiotics holds promise for the development of more effective or more active derivatives. However, we recently described a lantibiotic that possesses antimicrobial activity, but also possesses toxin activity. The aim of the present study is therefore to determine the structural basis for this toxin activity and establish principles for the safe engineering of this lantibiotic,the cytolysin of Enterococcus faecalis, and others for use in food preservation.