The molecular dynamics simulations (MD) of the peptide-(GlcNAc)3 complexes were carried out in water environment, using the Single Point Charge water model [8]. The analyses were performed by using the computational package GROMACS 4 [22]. The dynamics utilized the tridimensional models of the peptide-(GlcNAc)3 complexes as initial structures, immersed in water molecules in cubic boxes with a minimum distance of 0.7 nm between the complexes and the boxes frontiers. Chlorine ions were also inserted at selleck kinase inhibitor the complexes with positive charges in order to neutralize the system charge. Geometry of water molecules was constrained by using the SETTLE algorithm

[41]. All atom bond lengths were linked by using the LINCS algorithm [21]. Electrostatic corrections were made by Particle Mesh Ewald algorithm [11], with a cut off radius of 1.4 nm in order to minimize the computational

time. The same cut off radius was also used for van der Waals interactions. The list of neighbors of each atom was updated every 10 simulation steps of 2 fs. The conjugate gradient and the steepest descent algorithms – 2 ns each – were implemented for energy minimization. After that, the system underwent into a normalization of pressure and temperature, using the integrator stochastic dynamics – 2 ns each. The systems with minimized energy, balanced temperature and pressure were carried out using a step of position restraint, using the integrator molecular dynamics – 2 ns. The simulations were carried out at 300 K in silico. The total time for each ensemble simulation was 50 ns. The MD simulations were analyzed by means of root-mean-square deviation (RMSD), root-mean-square fluctuation (RMSF) and number of hydrogen check details bonds GNA12 that kept the complex stable along the simulation. Initially, by

using the automatic search system, thirteen sequences were retrieved from SwissProt database. Due to the presence of hevein domains in other lectins which are not hevein-like peptides, the automatic search system was set to avoid sequences longer than 130 amino acid residues, ensuring the selection of hevein-like peptides. However, from the thirteen sequences, ten sequences showed the hevein domain. The other three sequences were removed from further analysis. Among the sequences containing the hevein domain, nine showed similarities to merolectins and only one was similar to hololectin. Among the merolectins, eight sequences were annotated as fungicidal peptides. These data are summarized in Table 1. The eight fungicidal sequences were used for pattern recognition. The best generated pattern was C[GNP][ANS]X[LM]CC[GS]X[FWY]G[FWY]CGX[GST][ADNP]XYC[GS]X[AGS] with a fitness of 61.5531, where an amino acid between brackets indicates that the position can be filled up by one of them; ‘X’ indicates a wild card, which can be filled up by any of 20 natural amino acid residues. The other generated patterns were redundant or did not have the cysteine residues in conserved positions (data not shown).