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Abstract
Antibiotic resistance is a main problem of international health that concerns the governments to work on sanitary regulation, evaluate costs in the production and distribution of medicines and develop information campaigns in order to eradicate the vectors that produce infectious diseases. The progressive overuse of antibiotics generates microbial resistance and reinforce the need to produce new drugs and pharmaceutical forms1. Anti-microbial peptides have been isolated from species of all kingdoms and are classified according to the structure of their aminoacidic motifs. Some antimicrobial peptides constitute the product of several periods of co-evolution of superior organisms with microorganisms and are considered as the first line of immunological defense. Anti-microbial peptides showed a wide spectrum of interactions with the cell membranes of microorganisms in order to produce cellular lysis. In general, they are short amino acid sequences of 12 to 100 units and usually cationic, with a net positive charge (between +2 and +9) and amphipathic. They are widely distributed in nature. In 2004, it was described “The Antimicrobial Peptide Database (APD) (aps.unmc.edu/AP/main.php)” and its second version (APD2), allowed to search for peptidic families such as bacteriocins, ciclotides and defensins; peptide sources including post-translational modified peptides such as lipidation, glycosylation of D-amino acids and; peptide targets such as membranes, proteins, ADN/ARN, lipopolysaccharides or sugars2. Finally, the database contains information for the
prediction and design of peptides and provides links to other databases.