The spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become a pandemic due to the high transmission and mortality rate of this virus. The world health and economic sectors have been severely affected by this deadly virus, exacerbated by the lack of sufficient efficient vaccines. The design of effective drug candidates and their rapid development is necessary to combat this virus. In this study, we selected 23 antimicrobial peptides from the literature and predicted their structure using PEP-FOLD 3.5. In addition, we docked them to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) to study their capability to inhibit the RBD, which plays a significant role in virus binding, fusion and entry into the host cell. We used several docking programs including HDOCK, HPEPDOCK, ClusPro, and HawkDock to calculate the binding energy of the protein-peptide complexes. We identified four peptides with high binding free energy and docking scores. The docking results
Researchers at the University of Exeter show that the effect of bacteriostatic antibiotics triggering CRISPR-Cas immunity results from slower phage replication inside the cell. This provides more time for the CRISPR-Cas defense system to acquire immunity and clear the phage infection. The research therefore identifies that the speed of phage replication is a crucial factor controlling the possibility for CRISPR-Cas systems to defend against viruses.