Glycosylation and Lipidation Strategies: Approaches for Improving Antimicrobial Peptide Efficacy

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have recently gained attention as a viable solution for combatting antibiotic resistance due to their numerous advantages, including their broad-spectrum activity, low propensity for inducing resistance, and low cytotoxicity. Unfortunately, their clinical application is limited due to their short half-life and susceptibility to proteolytic cleavage by serum proteases. Indeed, several chemical strategies, such as peptide cyclization, N-methylation, PEGylation, glycosylation, and lipidation, are widely used for overcoming these issues. This review describes how lipidation and glycosylation are commonly used to increase AMPs’ efficacy and engineer novel AMP-based delivery systems. The glycosylation of AMPs, which involves the conjugation of sugar moieties such as glucose and N-acetyl galactosamine, modulates their pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties, improves their antimicrobial activity, and reduces their interaction with mammalian cells, thereby increasing selectivity toward bacterial membranes. In the same way, lipidation of AMPs, which involves the covalent addition of fatty acids, has a significant impact on their therapeutic index by influencing their physicochemical properties and interaction with bacterial and mammalian membranes. This review highlights the possibility of using glycosylation and lipidation strategies to increase the efficacy and activity of conventional AMPs.