Combating Fuel Biocontamination: Tailored Antimicrobial Peptides and an Innovative Delivery Strategy

Microbial invasion and subsequent fuel biocontamination have long posed significant challenges, leading to a significant infrastructural damage. The lack of systematic data on the correlation between environmental parameters and microbial growth has hampered the development of targeted solutions to date. To address this challenge, this study reports a targeted strategy to inactivate and control the proliferation of commonly identified fuel-contaminating microbial clusters through the development of synthetic peptides that can be delivered directly to fuel samples. From a library of short peptides which was designed based on the indolicidin template peptides, three unique sequences were found to have good broad-spectrum activity toward a range of microbes such as <i>Bacillus</i>, <i>Sphingomonas</i>, and <i>Hormoconis</i>, with P17, showing the highest killing potential. The structural analyses of the peptides based on circular dichroism spectroscopy revealed the helical propensity of the peptides in SDS micelles and a random flexible structure in solution. The peptides showed stability under biological conditions and minimal cytotoxicity against mammalian cells. This study presents an innovative method to effectively address fuel biocontamination using short peptides coupled with a potentially scalable protocol to administer the peptides to fuel samples.