Molecular Biological Strategies in the Analysis of Antibiotic Peptide Gene Families: The Use Oligonucleotides as Hybridization Probes

Antibiotic peptides are host defense effector molecules broadly distributed throughout the animal kingdom. Many different families of peptides can be identified based on mature peptide structure or, in some cases, by similar propeptide structure (1 ). These peptides have been identified in a variety of different cell and tissue types. In several instances, members of a single family of antibiotic peptides are distributed in multiple tissues in a single species. In some species, such as human, more than one family of antibiotic peptide has been identified (2 ,3 ). These features afford opportunities to better understand the principles underlying the evolution of this system of host defense.