A platform for deep sequence-activity mapping and engineering antimicrobial peptides

Developing potent antimicrobials, and platforms for their study and engineering, is critical as antibiotic resistance grows. A high-throughput method to quantify antimicrobial peptide and protein (AMP) activity across a broad continuum can elucidate sequence-activity landscapes and identify potent mutants. We developed a platform to perform sequence-activity mapping of AMPs via depletion (SAMP-Dep): a bacterial host culture is transformed with an AMP mutant library, induced to express AMPs, grown, and deep sequenced to quantify mutant frequency. The slope of mutant growth rate versus induction level indicates potency. Using SAMP-Dep, we screened 170,000 mutants of oncocin, a proline-rich AMP, for intracellular activity against Escherichia coli. Clonal validation of 36 mutants supported SAMP-Dep sensitivity and accuracy. The efficiency and accuracy of SAMP-Dep enabled mapping the oncocin sequence-activity space with remarkable detail and scale and guided focused, successful synthetic peptide library design, yielding a mutant with two-fold enhancement in both intracellular and extracellular activity.