full issue - Association of Biotechnology and Pharmacy

Current Trends in Biotechnology and PharmacyVol. 5 (2) 1134-1148 April 2011. ISSN 0973-8916 (Print), 2230-7303 (Online)Genome Analysis of Selected Foodborne Pathogens forIdentification of Drug Targets1134Sushil Kumar Shakyawar, Arun Goyal and Vikash Kumar Dubey *Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahai,Guwahati-781 039, Assam, India*For Correspondence - vdubey@iitg.ernet.inAbstractAs the bacterial pathogens are showinggrowing resistance against existing antibiotics,there is an urgent requirement of pharmaceuticalcompanies for designing new and effective drugsagainst these pathogens causing commonfoodborne diseases. We have performed in-silicogenomic analysis of two virulent foodbornepathogens Listeria monocytogenes and Bacilluscereus for identification of potential drug targetsfor novel drug discovery. Our prediction foundsmall number of genes of each pathogen to betargeted for drug designing. The gene productsare found to be involved in various importantregulatory proteins, membrane proteins andhypothetical proteins of unknown function ofbacterial species. Further using KEGG pathwayprediction various enzyme proteins were foundwhich have active role in biosynthetic andmetabolic pathways. The primary goal of thisstudy was to provide a valuable resource of drugtargets to the scientific community. The currentdata is included in “Drug Targets ProteinDatabase” developed by our group.Key word: Antimicrobial drugs; Essentialproteins; Drug targets.IntroductionBurden of microbial diseases andsimultaneously more antibiotic resistance shownby bacteria on existing antibiotic drugs needs adifferent approach to find drug targets fordestroying bacteria more effectively. Thedevelopment of effective antimicrobial drugs isthe major challenge in field of pharmacogenomics.Growing number of microbial genome sequencingprojects have generated large number ofsequences. Recently, a number of computationaltools have been developed for in silico analysisof gene sequence information (1). The genomeinformation is also useful to identify potential andessential candidate of the microbial systems (2).A good target is a gene essential for bacteria tosurvive, yet cannot be found in the mammalianhost (3). An ideal drug target should provideadequate selectivity yielding a drug which isspecific or highlys elective against the pathogenwith respect to the human host. Moreover, thetarget should be involved in viability, growth andother essential metabolic processes of thepathogen at least under the condition of infection(4). Most of the previous research is revealedwith identification of essential gene on the basisof experimental data acquired from genedisruption and systematic mutagenesis studies onthe bacterium (5). There is huge chance of lethalaction on bacteria by inactivation of essentialgenes. Targeting non human homologous genesare much important to avoid possibilities ofunacceptable crossreactivity that might causesGenome analysis of selected foodborne pathogens