Reptilian β-defensins: Expanding the repertoire of known crocodylian peptides

Abstract

One of the major families of host defense peptides (HDPs) in vertebrates are β-defensins. They constitute important components of innate immunity and have remained an interesting topic of research for more than two decades. While many β-defensin sequences in mammals and birds have been identified and their properties and functions characterized, β-defensin peptides from other groups of vertebrates, particularly reptiles, are still largely unexplored. In this review, we focus on reptilian β-defensins and summarize different aspects of their biology, such as their genomic organization, evolution, structure, and biological activities. Reptilian β-defensin genes exhibit similar genomic organization to birds and their number and gene structure are variable among different species. During the evolution of reptiles, several gene duplication and deletion events have occurred and the functional diversification of β-defensins has been mainly driven by positive selection. These peptides display broad antimicrobial activity in vitro, but a deeper understanding of their mechanisms of action in vivo, including their role as immunomodulators, is still lacking. Reptilian β-defensins constitute unique polypeptide sequences to expand our current understanding of innate immunity in these animals and elucidate core biological functions of this family of HDPs across amniotes.

Keywords: Bioinformatics; Evolution; Host defense peptides; Innate immunity; Reptiles; β-defensins.