- Article -
| In Silico Biology 6, 0015 (2006); ©2006, Bioinformation Systems e.V. |
In silico analysis of genes nucleoprotein, neuraminidase and hemagglutinin: A comparative study on different strains of influenza A (Bird Flu) virus sub-type H5N1
Tamanna Anwar1, Sunil K. Lal3 and Asad U. Khan1,2*
1 Distributed Information Sub-centre
2 Interdisciplinary Biotechnology Unit Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh 202002, India
3 International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi 110 067, India
* Corresponding author
Email: huzzi99@hotmail.com
Edited by E. Wingender; received January 02, 2006; revised February 25 and March 03, 2006; accepted March 03, 2006; published June 17, 2006
Abstract
The avian influenza (bird flu) is an infectious disease of birds, ranging from a mild to a severe form of illness. Influenza viruses pose significant challenges to both human and animal health. The proteins, nucleoprotein (NP), neuraminidase (NA) and hemagglutinin (HA) of influenza A virus (Bird flu virus) sub-type A/Hatay/2004/(H5N1) from chicken were selected for this study. Our in silico analysis predicted that HA of influenza A virus is highly sensitive to mutations and hence it is significant for its pathogenic nature. None of the mutations was detected as an important change except in NA where K332R was at a PKC phosphorylation site. Analysis of the sequence comparison showed that the maximum number of mutations were observed in HA. These mutations are significant as they are involved in change in polarity or hydrophobicity as well as in propensity of each amino acid residue to stabilize the secondary structure. The program MAPMUTATION can be used to monitor the mutations, and predict the trend of mutations.
Keywords: nucleoprotein, neuraminidase, hemagglutinin, mutation, protein kinase C phosphorylation