Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Department of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, JSBB, SHIATS, Allahabad-211007; ²Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, CET, SHIATS, Allahabad-211007; ³Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay-400076, India; ⁴Apex Bioinformatics Centre, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, CGO Complex, Lodhi Road, New Delhi – 110 003.

Email

gulshan@dbt.nic.in; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received February 11, 2012; Accepted February 11, 2012; Published February 28, 2012

Trichomonas vaginalis causes the trichomoniasis, in women and urethritis and prostate cancer in men. Its genome draft published by TIGR in 2007 presents many unusual genomic and biochemical features like, exceptionally large genome size, the presence of hydrogenosome, gene duplication, lateral gene transfer mechanism and the presence of miRNA. To understand some of genomic features we have performed a comparative analysis of metabolic pathways of the T. vaginalis with other 22 common organisms. Enzymes from the biochemical pathways of T. vaginalis and other selected organisms were retrieved from the KEGG metabolic pathway database. The metabolic pathways of T. vaginalis common in other selected organisms were identified. Total 101 enzymes present in different metabolic pathways of T. vaginalis were found to be orthologous by using BLASTP program against the selected organisms. Except two enzymes all identified orthologous enzymes were also identified as paralogous enzymes. 75 of identified enzymes were also identified as essential for the survival of T. vaginalis while 26 as non-essential. The identified essential enzymes also represent as good candidate for novel drug targets. Interestingly some of the identified orthologous and paralogous enzymes were found playing significant role in the key metabolic activities and others were found playing active role in the process of pathogenesis. The N-acetylneuraminate lyase was analyzed as the candidate of lateral genes transfer. These findings clearly suggest the active participation of lateral gene transfer and gene duplication during evolution of T. vaginalis from the enteric to the pathogenic urogenital environment.

Keywords

T. vaginalis, metabolic pathway, genome evolution, lateral gene transfer.

Citation

Singh et al. Bioinformation 8(4): 189-195 (2012)
 

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.