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

Herein, a kind of similarity networks, called the Half-Space Proximal Network (HSPN) is applied to represent/analyse the chemical space of the ABFPs aimed to identify promising scaffolds for the development of next generation antimicrobials, able to target both planktonic and biofilm microbial forms. Such analyses also considered the metadata associated to 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 representing the original antibiofilm space was extracted. This subset retained from the most central to atypical ABFPs, having some of them, desired properties for developing next generation antimicrobials. So, this subset is advisable for assisting the search/design both new antibiofilm/antimicrobial agents. The provided ABFP motifs list, discovered within the HSPN communities, is also useful for the same purpose.