Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹R & D Center, Department of Biotechnology, Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore-560 078, Karnataka, India; ²Department of Biotechnology, Karunya University, Coimbatore- 641 114, Tamilnadu, India

Email

sinoshskariya@gmail.com; *Corresponding author

Phone

+91 9739654015, +91 8042161748

Fax

080-42161747

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received July 25, 2011; Accepted July 29, 2011; Published August 02, 2011

Clostridium perfringens (a versatile pathogenic bacterium) secretes enterotoxins (the deltatoxin, virulent factor) and causes food borne gastroenteritis and gasgangrene. The organism was isolated and characterized from improperly cooked meat and poultry samples. The isolated organism showed multiple drug resistance indicating that the treatment is challenging. Hence, there is need for improved therapeutic agents. The rational design of improved therapeutics requires the crystal structure for the toxin. However, the structure for the toxin is not yet available in its native form. Thus, we modeled the toxin structure using a-hemolysin of Staphylococcus aureus (PDB: 3M4D chain A) as template. The docking of the toxin with the herbal extract curcumin (1,7-bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)hepta-1,6-diene-3,5-dione) showed a binding energy of -8.6 Kcal/mol, in comparison to the known antibiotic Linezolid with binding energy of -6.1 Kcal/mol. This data finds application in the design and development of novel compounds against the deltatoxin from Clostridium perfringens.

Keywords

Clostridium perfringens, multidrug resistance, deltatoxin, molecular docking, design, curcumin

Citation

Skariyachan et al. Bioinformation 6(10): 375-379 (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.