Marine Knottins with Remarkable Biological Functions Cast a Promising Outlook on Clinical Translation

Ocean, which covers approximately 71% of the earth’s surface, is an ancient and mysterious habitat with diversiform marine ecosystem. Millions of unique marine organisms survive in this high-salt, hypertonic, tenebrous, and microthermal liquid environment and these extreme living environments endowed them the special capacity for producing structurally and biofunctionally unique metabolites. 

Especially marine-derived knottin peptides, which play an important role in the chemical defense or invasion when creatures are struggling to survive in nature, exhibited amazing bioactivities against diverse human diseases. Thus, discovery of marine knottins opened a new chapter in peptide drug leads research as well as in pharmaceutical industry.Knottins are intriguing mini-proteins, also known as cystine knot peptides, typically containing 30~50 amino acids and rich in cysteines. The most distinctive characteristic of knottin is that three disulfide bonds interlace into the knot in the core of the structure.  Read more..............