Title

Insights from the protein-protein interaction network analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis toxin-antitoxin systems

Authors

Zoozeal Thakur¹, Renu Dharra¹, Vandana Saini², Ajit Kumar^2*, Promod K. Mehta^1*

Affiliation

¹Centre for Biotechnology, Maharshi Dayanand University (MDU), Rohtak-124001 (Haryana), India; ²Toxicology & Computational Biology Group, Centre for Bioinformatics, Maharshi Dayanand University (MDU), Rohtak-124001 (Haryana), India;

Email

pkmehta3@hotmail.com

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received October 6, 2017; Revised November 11, 2017; Accepted November 11, 2017; Published November 30, 2017

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis is a powerful strategy to understand M. tuberculosis (Mtb) system level physiology in the identification of hub proteins. In the present study, the PPI network of 79 Mtb toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems comprising of 167 nodes and 234 edges was investigated. The topological properties of PPI network were examined by ‘Network analyzer’ a cytoscape plugin app and STRING database. The key enriched biological processes and the molecular functions of Mtb TA systems were analyzed by STRING. Manual curation of the PPI data identified four proteins (i.e. Rv2762c, VapB14, VapB42 and VapC42) to possess the highest number of interacting partners. The top 15% hub proteins were identified in the PPI network by employing two statistical measures, i.e. betweenness and radiality by employing cytohubba. Insights gained from the molecular protein models of VapC9 and VapC10 are also documented.

Keywords

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Toxin-antitoxin, STRING, Cytoscape, Homology Modeling

Citation

Thakur et al. Bioinformation 13(11) 380-387 (2017)

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.