Title

Implication from predictions of HLA-DRB1 binding peptides in the membrane proteins of Corynebacterium diphtheriae

Authors

Febin Prabhu Dass J¹ and V. L. Deepika^1, *

Affiliation

¹Bioinformatics Division, School of Biotechnology, Chemical and Biomedical Engineering VIT University, Vellore, Tamilnadu, India

Email

v.l.deepika@gmail.com; * Corresponding author

Article Type

Web Server

Date

received September 18, 2008, accepted October 21, 2008; published November 02, 2008

Abstract

The aerobic gram positive bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae causes diphtheria, a respiratory tract illness characterized by symptoms such as sore throat, low fever, and an adherent membrane on the tonsils, pharynx, and/or nasal cavity. Therefore, it is important to develop preventive vaccines for diphtheria. The availability of the 2,488,635 bp long complete sequence for the C. diphtheriae genome provides an opportunity to understand cell mediated immune response using Computational Biology tools from the bacterial proteome sequence data. We selected 355 membrane proteins from the C. diphtheriae proteome using annotation data to identify potential HLA-DRB1 binding short peptide using modeling, simulations and predictions. This exercise identified 30 short peptides in membrane proteins showing binding capability to HLA-DRB1 alleles. These peptides serve as outline for the understanding of cell mediated immune response to C. diphtheriae. It should be noted that the predicted data to be verified using binding assays for further consideration.

Keywords

peptide epitopes; vaccines, HLA-DRB; membrane proteins; C. diphtheriae

Citation

Dass & Deepika, Bioinformation 3(3): 111-113 (2008)

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.