Title

Authors

Bharti Bhatia¹, Sanket Singh Ponia¹, Amit Kumar Solanki¹, Aparna Dixit² & Lalit C Garg¹*

Affiliation

¹National Institute of Immunology, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi – 110067, India; ²School of Biotechnololgy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi-110067, India

Email

lalit@nii.res.in, lalitcgarg@yahoo.com; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received June 19, 2014; Accepted June 26, 2014; Published July 22, 2014

Clostridium perfringens is an anaerobic pathogen known to cause vast number of diseases in mammals and birds. Various toxins and hydrolysing enzymes released by the organism are responsible for the necrosis of soft tissues. Due to serious safety issues associated with current vaccines against C. perfringens, there is a need for new drug or vaccine targets. C. perfringens is extremely dependent on its host for nutrition which can be targeted for vaccine development or drug design. Therefore, it is of interest to identify the unique transport systems used by C. perfringens involved in uptake of essential amino acids that are synthesized by the host, so that therapeutic agents can be designed to target the specific transport systems. Use of bioinformatics tools resulted in the identification of a protein component of the glutamate transport system that is not present in the host. Analysis of the conservation profile of the protein domain indicated it to be a glutamate binding protein which also stimulates the ATPase activity of ATP Binding Cassettes (ABC) transporters. Homology modelling of the protein showed two distinct lobes, which is a characteristic of substrate binding proteins. This suggests that the carboxylates of glutamate might be stabilized by electrostatic interactions with basic residues as is observed with other binding proteins. Hence, the homology model of this potential drug target can be employed for in silico docking studies by suitable inhibitors.  

Keywords

Clostridium perfringens, Essential amino acids, Glutamate ABC transporter system, Domain profiling, Drug targets

Citation

Bhatia et al.   Bioinformation 10(7): 401-405 (2014)
 

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.