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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

chemokine binding, bacterial response, C terminus, chemokine CCL28

College

Life Sciences

Department

Microbiology and Molecular Biology

Abstract

For this project, I hypothesized that the amino acid composition of the C terminus of chemokine proteins allows some chemokines to bind to specific proteins on the cell membrane of bacteria. Previous research has shown that the C terminal region of the chemokine CCL28 is largely responsible for the antimicrobial activity (Liu, 2010). However, it has not been shown what the C terminus region of the chemokine binds to. The C terminus region could bind to the negatively charged LPS on the bacterial membrane, or have a specific protein target on the cell membrane. Polymyxin B, another antimicrobial protein that has a similar structure to CCL28, has been shown to bind directly to the LPS of bacteria, while CXCL10, another antimicrobial chemokine, has been shown to directly bind to the membrane protein FtsX in Bacillus anthracis (Applemelk, 1992; Crawford, 2011). During the course of this experiment, I used a variety of methods to try and determine if a protein was the target of chemokine binding, and if so, which protein was the specific protein target for CCL28.

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