Discovery and characterization of hevein-like peptides from American ginseng

Abstract

Hevein-Like Peptides (HLPs) are one of the many categories under plant Cysteine-Rich Peptides (CRPs). CRPs possess abundant cysteine and unique multiple disulfide bridges, which confer high thermostable properties. As such, they are touted as potential active ingredients in biotherapeutics. However, only a small number of HLPs have been discovered in the Viridiplantae kingdom. Recently, HLPs from the Panax family were found to be deprived of chitin-binding domain. This suggests that HLPs may well possess other functions in addition to the usual chitin-binding activity. Therefore, HLPs remains underexplored due to its unknown relative abundancy and limited understanding of its structural diversity. In this project, we built motifs to search for putative HLPs using the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) and National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database. More than 3000 putative HLPs sequences and several novel motif sequences were identified. Our results show that HLPs in the Viridiplantae kingdom are likely to be in abundance and of wide diversity. Results may be used to observe amino acids composition, sequence diversity and evolutionary relationship. Conclusions drawn from this project may help to further HLPs research and deepen our understanding of plant molecular diversity.