Sophie M Coulter

Queen's University Belfast | QUB · School of Pharmacy

Achieving precise control over gelator alignment and morphology is crucial for crafting tailored materials and supramolecular structures with distinct properties. We successfully aligned the self-assembled micelles formed by a functionalized dipeptide 2NapFF into long 1-D “gel noodles” by cross-linking with divalent metal chlorides. We identify the...

Antimicrobial peptides exist throughout nature and are produced by multicellular organisms as a defence mechanism against pathogenic microbes. Multi-drug-resistant bacteria pose a serious threat to public health. In the increasing absence of new antibiotic agents, there is a need for the development of novel strategies to target bacterial infection...

Eradicating HIV/AIDS by 2030 is a central goal of the World Health Organization. Patient adherence to complicated dosage regimens remains a key barrier. There is a need for convenient long‐acting formulations that deliver drugs over sustained periods. This paper presents an alternative platform, an injectable in situ forming hydrogel implant to del...

The use of hydrogels has garnered significant interest as biomaterial and drug delivery platforms for anti-infective applications. For decades antimicrobial peptides have been heralded as a much needed new class of antimicrobial drugs. Self-assembling peptide hydrogels with inherent antimicrobial ability have recently come to the fore. However, the...

Recent studies on peptide hydrogels have shown that ultrashort peptides (<8 amino acids) can self-assemble into hydrogels. Ultrashort peptides can be designed to incorporate antimicrobial motifs, such as positively charged lysine residues, so that the peptides have inherent antimicrobial characteristics. Antimicrobial hydrogels represent a step cha...

The increasing emergence of multidrug‐resistant bacteria is a huge problem to society providing significant risks to public health. This has been further escalated by a decline in the clinical translation of new antibacterial drug classes since the 1980s. In this article, we describe the synthesis, antibacterial/antibiofilm activity and in vitro to...

We present a method to trigger the formation of dipeptide-based hydrogels by the simple addition of dopamine. Dopamine undergoes oxidation in air, reducing the pH to induce gelation. The production of polydopamine and release of reactive oxygen species such as hydrogen peroxide confers antimicrobial activity. Gel stiffness can be controlled by modu...

Peptide nanotubes are promising materials for a variety of biomedical applications with ultrashort (≤7 amino acids) forms providing particular promise for clinical translation. The manufacture of peptide nanotubes has, however, been associated with toxic organic solvents restricting clinical use. The purpose of this work is to formulate dipeptide n...

Self-assembled peptides have been shown to form well-defined nanostructures which display outstanding characteristics for many biomedical applications and especially in controlled drug delivery. Such biomaterials are becoming increasingly popular due to routine, standardized methods of synthesis, high biocompatibility, biodegradability and ease of...

Technological advances in protein biochemistry now enable researchers to modify the structure of peptides to enable them to possess self-assembling properties, forming hydrogels at low concentrations. Peptides can be altered further to provide multifunctional characteristics, for example, to demonstrate antimicrobial properties. The aim of this art...

Biofilms present a major problem to industry and healthcare worldwide. Composed of a population of surface-attached microbial cells surrounded by a protective extracellular polysaccharide matrix, they are responsible for increased tolerance to antibiotics, treatment failure and a resulting rise in antimicrobial resistance. Here we demonstrate that...

The threat of antimicrobial resistance to society is compounded by a relative lack of new clinically effective licensed therapies reaching patients over the past three decades. This has been particularly problematic within antifungal drug development, leading to a rise in fungal infection rates and associated mortality. This paper highlights the po...

The threat of antimicrobial resistance to society is compounded by a relative lack of new clinically effective licensed therapies reaching patients over the past three decades. This has been particularly problematic within antifungal drug development leading to a rise in fungal infection rates and associated mortality. This paper highlights the pot...

Peptide-based materials are receiving significant attention for use within biomedicine due to their high chemical and functional versatility enabling tailoring of their structure to replicate the properties of host tissue and the extracellular matrix. This paper studies the design, synthesis and characterization of NSAID-peptide conjugates. Attachm...