- Communication -
| In Silico Biology 6, 0005 (2006); ©2006, Bioinformation Systems e.V. |
In silico identification of potential therapeutic targets in the human pathogen Helicobacter pylori
Anirban Dutta1, Shashi Kr. Singh1, Payel Ghosh1, Runni Mukherjee1, Sayak Mitter1 and Debashis Bandyopadhyay2*
1 Department of Biotechnology, Bengal College of Engineering & Technology, Durgapur - 713 212, India
2 Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata - 700 032, India
* Corresponding author
Email: bdebashis@excite.com; Phone: +91-33-2473 4971 (Extn:106); Fax: +91-33-2483 6561
Edited by E. Wingender; received August 31, 2005; revised October 27 & December 29, 2005; accepted December 29, 2005; published January 03, 2006
Abstract
Availability of genome sequences of pathogens has provided a tremendous amount of information that can be useful in drug target and vaccine target identification. One of the recently adopted strategies is based on a subtractive genomics approach, in which the subtraction dataset between the host and pathogen genome provides information for a set of genes that are likely to be essential to the pathogen but absent in the host. This approach has been used successfully in recent times to identify essential genes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We have used the same methodology to analyse the whole genome sequence of the human gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori. Our analysis revealed that out of the 1590 coding sequences of the pathogen, 40 represent essential genes that have no human homolog. We have further analysed these 40 genes by the protein sequence databases to list some 10 genes whose products are possibly exposed on the pathogen surface. This preliminary work reported here identifies a small subset of the Helicobacter proteome that might be investigated further for identifying potential drug and vaccine targets in this pathogen.
Keywords: Helicobacter, comparative microbial genomics, subtractive genomics, novel drug targets, putative vaccine targets, surface proteins