Antimicrobial mechanism
LL-37 kills mostly by disrupting membranes, not by hitting a single enzyme.
How a peptide breaks a bacterium open
LL-37 kills mostly by disrupting membranes, not by hitting a single enzyme. It gathers on a microbial surface, its greasy face slides into the lipid, and the bilayer gives way. Because the target is the membrane rather than a single protein, the field long assumed resistance would be hard to acquire.
That assumption has not survived. Reviews of this peptide now record the emergence of bacterial resistance, which contradicts initial claims of non-resistance, so this unit treats the resistance question as open rather than settled. It walks the killing mechanism step by step, compares the competing physical models, and then confronts what happens to the peptide in real host fluids, which is the gap between a lab result and a working antibiotic.