Abstract
AbstractThere are growing examples of drug resistance in the fungal pathogens to evade antifungal drugs by developing mutation in the key targeted enzymes and high expression of drug transporter genes including ABC transporters and MFS transporters. This led to the urgent need to identify novel (unique or essential to fungus) targets that can be used in development of potential antifungal drugs. We have used a comparative genomics approach to find out novel targets in opportunistic fungus, Candida albicans responsible for severe infection in immunocompromised humans. To identify novel targets we have analyzed available total 14,633 protein sequences (proteome) of C. albicans [SC5314] retrieved through RefSeq, an experimentally curated reference sequence database at NCBI, USA. To explore the unique proteins, proteome of C. albicans was first compared against human proteome and then with Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Yeast) through BLAST program (NCBI). Results showed that out of the available 14,633 protein sequences of C. albicans, 4,568 were identified unique when compared against human, while 2,955 were identified unique when compared against S. cerevisiae. Further work is ongoing to explore functionally known and unknown, unique or essential proteins/genes of C. albicans. Predicted as well as experimental data has been compiled in the form of a database namely, ‘CaTargetDB’, available at local internet LAN network of CIMAP.
Highlights
Candida albicans, an opportunistic flora inhabitant of human gastrointestinal tract with no pathogenic consequence in healthy people
To explore the unique proteins, proteome of C. albicans was first compared against human proteome and with S. cerevisiae (Yeast) through BLAST (Altschul, et al)program (NCBI)
Out of 14633 proteins of C. albicans, 4568 proteins resulted unique or essential to Candida and not showed any similarity with Human proteome
Summary
An opportunistic flora inhabitant of human gastrointestinal tract with no pathogenic consequence in healthy people. It causes severe mucosal infection and sometimes systemic infection leading to candidiasis in immunocompromised patient. Comparative genomics approach uses genome wide screening of potential targets including all functional categories. These can be further classified into different groups like enzyme, transporter, receptor, transcription factors etc. We have analyzed 14,633 proteins of C. albicans proteome and after comparison with human proteome, we have predicted 4,568 unique proteins.
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