Title

Authors

Affiliation

Department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Kuvempu University, Shankarghatta- 577451, Karnataka, India

Email

rmahmood@kuvempu.ac.in; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received October 24, 2013; Revised November 05, 2013; Accepted November 06, 2013; Published December 06, 2013

The current reach of genomics extends facilitated identification of microbial virulence factors, a primary objective for antimicrobial drug and vaccine design. Many putative proteins are yet to be identified which can act as potent drug targets. There is lack and limitation of methods which appropriately combine several omics ways for putative and new drug target identification. The study emphasizes a combined bioinformatic and theoretical method of screening unique and putative drug targets, lacking similarity with experimentally reported essential genes and drug targets. Synteny based comparison was carried out with 11 streptococci considering S. gordonii as reference genome. It revealed 534 non-homologous genes of which 334 were putative. Similarity search against host proteome, metabolic pathway annotation and subcellular localization predication, identified 16 potent drug targets. This is a first attempt of several combinational approaches of similarity search with target protein structural features for screening drug targets, yielding a pipeline which can be substantiated to other human pathogens.

Keywords

Streptococcus gordonii, infective endocarditis, drug targets, tractability, druggibility, ensemble.

Citation

Telkar et al.  Bioinformation 9(19): 983-987 (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.