Since the discovery since penicillin, antibiotics have been a powerful weapon for human treatment of pathogenic microorganisms infections, but with the long-term antibiotics widely used, pathogen resistance formation are becoming increasingly serious and urgent requirement to develop new antibiotics, but before looking for new microorganisms the biological difficulty has been getting bigger and bigger. Animal-derived antimicrobial peptide (also known as the discovery of the bactericidal peptide, animal polypeptide antibiotics) for the development of new antibiotics to provide a new broad sources. In recent years, the rapid development of theoretical and applied research on antimicrobial peptides.
Discovery of antimicrobial peptides originated in the study of insect immune mechanism, when the insects by external stimuli, the immune responses induced in the body to a substance with a strong antibacterial activity, antimicrobial peptides is one of the major constituent. Later, amphibians, mammals isolated similar antibacterial activity polypeptide people a new understanding of the origin of antimicrobial peptides and their role in the evolution. With the in-depth study of the structure and function of antimicrobial peptides, antimicrobial peptides - biofilm interaction mechanism, the molecular biology of antimicrobial peptide genes, antimicrobial peptide gene engineering, antimicrobial peptides showing broad application prospects in health care, agriculture and other fields.