What are bacteriocins?

Bacteriocins represent an extremely diverse class of bacterial antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), making up an exciting and rapidly expanding field of research. These functional molecular entities encoded in bacterial DNA are naturally involved in controlling the dynamics of microbial flora, which underpin the balance of life on Earth and are therefore essential to human health. The remarkable evolutionary diversity in terms of molecular structures, targets and mechanisms of action has led the microbiology community to propose several classification methods for bacteriocins