Engineered antimicrobial-derived peptides to manipulate mixed microbial systems

We demonstrate a novel approach for top-down manipulation of microbial co-cultures by leveraging the narrow-spectrum activity of a class IIa bacteriocin (bacterial-derived antimicrobial peptide). We expect this approach to be applicable to other microbial communities/microbiota when expanded to other bacteriocins and may prove to be an invaluable tool in studying structure-function relationships in microbial communities and engineering them for a variety of applications.