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Modulation of Activity of Ultrashort Lipopeptides toward Negatively Charged Model Lipid Films.

Because of the increasing resistance of pathogens to commonly used antibiotics, there is an urgent need to find alternative antimicrobial compounds with different mechanisms of action. Among them, lipopeptides are recognized as promising candidates. In this work, the Langmuir technique and atomic force microscopy were employed to investigate the interactions of two novel lipopeptides with negatively charged phospholipid membranes, which served as a simplified model of inner membrane of Gram-negative bacteria. Lipid films contained phosphatidylethanolamine and phosphatidylglycerol extracts from E. coli bacteria. Lipopeptides were composed of palmitoyl chain covalently coupled to N-terminus of peptide with Trp-Lys-Leu-Lys amino acid sequence and the conformation of third residue was either d-Leu or l-Leu. It was found that chirality of leucine strongly affects interfacial behavior of these compounds, which was ascribed to the difference in effective size of the peptide portion of the molecules. Although the lipopeptides were the same in terms of amino acid sequence, charge, and identity of lipophilic chain, the experiments revealed that the barrier for their insertion into the lipid membrane is significantly different. Namely, it was lower for lipopeptide containing d-Leu residue. We have also found that insertion of the lipopeptides into the model membranes strongly alters lateral distribution of the membrane components and leads to its substantial fluidization. The dynamics of reorganization was noticeably faster in the presence of lipopeptide with smaller size of peptide moiety, i.e., containing d-Leu. It proves that effective size of the peptide headgroup is an important factor determining lipopeptide activity toward the lipid membranes.