Complex Networks Analyses of Antibiofilm Peptides: An Emerging Tool for Next-Generation Antimicrobials’ Discovery

Microbial biofilms cause several environmental and industrial issues, even affecting human health. Although they have long represented a threat due to their resistance to antibiotics, there are currently no approved antibiofilm agents for clinical treatments. The multi-functionality of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), including their antibiofilm activity and their potential to target multiple microbes, has motivated the synthesis of AMPs and their relatives for developing antibiofilm agents for clinical purposes. Antibiofilm peptides (ABFPs) have been organized in databases that have allowed the building of prediction tools which have assisted in the discovery/design of new antibiofilm agents. However, the complex network approach has not yet been explored as an assistant tool for this aim. Herein, a kind of similarity network called the half-space proximal network (HSPN) is applied to represent/analyze the chemical space of ABFPs, aiming to identify privileged scaffolds for the development of next-generation antimicrobials that are able to target both planktonic and biofilm microbial forms. Such analyses also considered the metadata associated with the ABFPs, such as origin, other activities, targets, etc., in which the relationships were projected by multilayer networks called metadata networks (METNs). From the complex networks’ mining, a reduced but informative set of 66 ABFPs was extracted, representing the original antibiofilm space. This subset contained the most central to atypical ABFPs, some of them having the desired properties for developing next-generation antimicrobials. Therefore, this subset is advisable for assisting the search for/design of both new antibiofilms and antimicrobial agents. The provided ABFP motifs list, discovered within the HSPN communities, is also useful for the same purpose.