Genome-wide analysis of Excretory/Secretory proteins in Trypanosoma brucei brucei: Insights into functional characteristics and identification of potential targets by immunoinformatics approach

Abstract

Trypanosoma brucei brucei (T.b.brucei) is an extra-cellular parasite that causes Animal African Trypanosomiasis (AAT) disease in animals. Till day, this disease is more difficult to treat and control due to lack of efficient vaccines and early diagnosis of the parasite infection. T.b.brucei Excretory/Secretory (ES) proteins were involved in pathogenesis and key for understanding the host-parasite interactions. Functions of T.b.brucei's ES proteins were poorly investigated and experimental identification is expensive and time-consuming. Bioinformatics approaches are cost-effective by facilitating the experimental analysis of potential drug targets for parasitic diseases. Here we applied several bioinformatics tools to predict and functionalize the annotation of 1104 ES proteins and immunoinformatics approaches carried out to predict and evaluate the epitopes in T.b.brucei. Secretory information, functional annotations and potential epitopes of each ES proteins were available at http://tbb.insilico.in. This study provides functional information of T.b.brucei for experimental studies to identify potential targets for diagnosis and therapeutics development.