Many congratulations to Dr Stefan Bidula for leading this work. It has been a pleasure to join you and your skilled team on this journey. Congratulations also to Fuad Mahamud as this is his first paper!

PhenDC3 even has greater antifungal activity towards the pan-azole-resistant A. fumigatus TR34/L98H isolate,

G-quadruplexes represent a promising target for the development of antifungals with novel mechanisms of action.

G-quadruplex stabilising ligand PhenDC3 folds the sequences into antiparallel G-quadruplexes in cyp51A & were associated with decreased transcription.

PhenDC3 also had potent fungistatic activity, prevented germination, synergised with the antifungal amphotericin

Sequences with the potential to form G-quadruplexes were found in genes involved in fungal growth, virulence, and drug resistance. This included cyp51A, which encodes the target of azole drugs.

These sequences were found to fold into unusual acid-stabilised G-quadruplex structures.

Fungi are estimated to cause the death of almost 4 million people annually, and we urgently need new drug targets to overcome antifungal resistance.

The team found that G-quadruplexes could form within the critical priority fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus.

@ucllifesciences.bsky.social @uclnews.bsky.social @ucl.ac.uk

Explainer on YouTube is also here: youtu.be/p1EHjqWRgfU

Thank you to the BBSRC for funding this work through the Norwich Research Park Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership (BB/M011216/1) and a research grant (BB/W001616/1).

The benefits of these peptides as ligands is that you can easily acquire these through custom-peptide synthesis. Peptides are also easily modifiable for other uses.
We look forward to developing these peptides further to make them better.

The c-Myc protein has been considered ‘undruggable’ for decades because of its flexible and multifaceted nature - by focusing on the DNA that controls its expression, rather than the protein itself, this is an alternative way to target this cancer gene.

We looked at two peptides in detail (PTN and VSE) and show that they are able to modulate cMYC transcription.

In this work we show a set of peptides which can bind the C-rich i-motif forming sequence of DNA in the promoter region of the oncogene cMYC.

Dr Effrosyni Alexandrou, Shuang Chen and Prof Shozeb Haider for their work on the modelling and Dr Chris Waudby on the NMR studies. It was a pleasure to host Dr Jessica King at UCL on a visit, and thanks also to her contributions with supporting Dilek.

Thank you to all the team for making this happen especially to Dr Summer Rosonovski, who worked through her PhD to develop the Phage Display methodology to find the peptides and Dr Dilek Guneri who characterised the peptides in detail using biological and biophysical methods.

Cute! Also love the vest!

Thank you Krystal. I have put a new image below and updated my settings ❤️