Towards characterizing of Enterocytozoon hepatopenaei (EHP) spore wall proteins with feature identification and analogy modeling

Abstract

Enterocytozoon hepatopenaei (EHP) is a parasite that mostly affects shrimp; it is linked to spore-forming and obligatory intracellular microsporidia and causes growth retardation and body length fluctuation, which results in financial consequences for the shrimp industry in Asian nations. However, the introduction of technologies to detect EHP has been complicated by the absence of a thorough knowledge of the properties of spore wall proteins (SWPs) linked to host infection. Thus, characterization, feature identification, 3D modeling of protein sequence, prediction of transmembrane regions, motif analysis, as well as model validation of SWPs can help improve drug delivery in the future. Conservation analysis was performed using ClustalW. InterPro, MEMEsuite, and TMHMM Server v2.0 were used to perform motif analysis, family domain prognosis, and transmembrane region analysis, respectively. Finally, the Alphafold2 server was used for analogy modeling and 3D layout. Different model validation servers were used to validate the protein structural model. Physicochemical features for SWPs were analyzed and found molecular weight around 16.701 KDa-38.314 KDa, theoretical pI 5.25–9.05, instability index 32.04–48.89, aliphatic index 76.49–99.84, grand average of hydropathicity (GRAVY) – 0.059 to −0.892. Each SWP was discovered to be hydrophilic. There was no significant region detected in the conserved region analysis. Both a lower and higher E value were found by the motif analysis. For most of the proteins, there were no transmembrane regions. Finally, analogous 3D models for each protein were created and verified using various bioinformatics tools and software. This investigation could aid in the further research of diseases and the development of drug delivery systems.