Title

Modelling and Characterization of Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein

Authors

Affiliation

¹CSIR- Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Mall Road, Delhi, India; ²Centre for Bioinformatics Studies, Dibrugarh University, Assam, India

Email

sagarika.biswas@igbi.res.in ;   *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received July 08, 2015; Revised July 30, 2015; Accepted August 01, 2015; Published August 31, 2015

Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein (GFAP) is an intermediate-filament (IF) protein that maintains the astrocytes of the Central Nervous System in Human. This is differentially expressed during serological studies in inflamed condition such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). Therefore, it is of interest to glean molecular insight using a model of GFAP (49.88 kDa) due to its crystallographic non-availability. The present study has been taken into consideration to construct computational protein model using Modeller 9.11. The structural relevance of the protein was verified using Gromacs 4.5 followed by validation through PROCHECK, Verify 3D, WHAT-IF, ERRAT and PROVE for reliability. The constructed three dimensional (3D) model of GFAP protein had been scrutinized to reveal the associated functions by identifying ligand binding sites and active sites. Molecular level interaction study revealed five possible surface cavities as active sites. The model finds application in further computational analysis towards drug discovery in order to minimize the effect of inflammation.

Keywords

Astrocytes, proteomics, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Modeller 9.11, Gromacs 4.5

Citation

Deka et al. Bioinformation 11(8): 393-400 (2015)
 

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.