Abstract
Many antimicrobial peptides directly disrupt bacterial membranes yet can also damage mammalian membranes. It is therefore central to their therapeutic use that rules governing the membrane selectivity of antimicrobial peptides be deciphered. However, this is difficult even for short peptides owing to the large combinatorial space of amino acid sequences. Here we describe a method for measuring the loss or maintenance of antimicrobial-peptide activity for thousands of peptide-sequence variants simultaneously, and its application to Protegrin-1, a potent yet toxic antimicrobial peptide, to determine the positional importance and flexibility of residues across its sequence while identifying variants with changes in membrane selectivity. More bacterially selective variants maintained a membrane-bound secondary structure while avoiding aromatic residues and cysteine pairs. A machine-learning model trained with our datasets accurately predicted membrane-specific activities for over 5.7 million Protegrin-1 variants, and identified one variant that showed substantially reduced toxicity and retention of activity in a mouse model of intraperitoneal infection. The high-throughput methodology may help elucidate sequence-structure-function relationships in antimicrobial peptides and inform the design of peptide-based synthetic drugs.