Title

Authors

Affiliation

Department of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Chittagong, Chittagong - 4331, Bangladesh

Email

ivanahmed96@yahoo.com; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received July 15, 2013; Accepted July 16, 2013; Published August 07, 2013

Macrophomina phaseolina is one of the deadliest necrotrophic fungal pathogens that infect more than 500 plant species including major food, fiber, and oil crops all throughout the globe. It secretes a cocktail of ligninolytic enzymes along with other hydrolytic enzymes for degrading the woody lignocellulosic plant cell wall and penetrating into the host tissue. Among them, lignin peroxidase has been reported only in Phanerochaete chrysosporium so far. But interestingly, a recent study has revealed a second occurrence of lignin peroxidase in M. phaseolina. However, lignin peroxidases are of much significance biotechnologically because of their potential applications in bio-remedial waste treatment and in catalyzing difficult chemical transformations. Besides, this enzyme also possesses agricultural and environmental importance on account of their role in lignin biodegradation. In the present work, different properties of the lignin peroxidase of M. phaseolina along with predicting the 3-D structure and its active sites were investigated by the use of various computational tools. The data from this study will pave the way for more detailed exploration of this enzyme in wet lab and thereby facilitating the strategies to be designed against such deadly weapons of Macrophomina phaseolina. Furthermore, the insight of such a ligninolytic enzyme will contribute to the assessment of its potentiality as a bioremediation tool.

Keywords

Macrophomina phaseolina, Ligin peroxidase, lignin.

Citation

Akbar et al.   Bioinformation 9(14): 730-735 (2013)

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.