Title

Authors

Affiliation

Bioinformatics Lab, AU-KBC Research Centre, M.I.T campus of Anna University Chennai, Chromepet, Chennai 600 044, India

Email

subazinitk@au-kbc.org; *Corresponding author

Phone

91 44 22234885, 91 9487114579

Fax

91 44 22231034

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received December 21, 2010; Accepted February 22, 2011; Published June 23, 2011

Aspergillus terreus is a filamentous ascomycota, which is prominent for its production of lovastatin, an antihypercholesterolemic drug. The commercial importance of lovastatin with annual sales of billions of dollars made us to focus on lovastatin biosynthetic cluster proteins. The analysis of these lovastatin biosynthetic cluster proteins with different perspectives such as physicochemical property, structure based analysis and functional studies were done to find out the role and function of every protein involved in the lovastatin biosynthesis pathway. Several computational tools are used to predict the physicochemical properties, secondary structural features, topology, patterns, domains and cellular location. There are 8 unidentified proteins in lovastatin biosynthetic cluster, in which 6 proteins have homologous partners, and annotation transfer is done based on the closely related homologous genes, and their structures are also modeled. The two other proteins that do not have homologous partners are predicted as PQ loop repeat protein that may be involved in glycosylation machinery and as thiolase-acyl activity by the integrated functional analysis approach.

Keywords

Aspergillus terreus, Functional annotation, HMG CoA reductase inhibitor, Lovastatin, Sequence analysis, Structure analysis.

Citation

Subazini & Kumar. Bioinformation 6(7): 250-254 (2011)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.