Home // BIOTECHNO 2011, The Third International Conference on Bioinformatics, Biocomputational Systems and Biotechnologies // View article

In silico Identification of Drug Targets in Methicillin/Multidrug-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Authors:
Nichole Haag
Kimberly Velk
Chun Wu

Keywords: Methicillin/multidrug-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), essential genes, Database of Essential Genes (DEG), drug targets, central metabolism

Abstract:
This paper reports an extension of an established bioinformatics approach to a new organism involving more than one strains for comparison. Methicillin/multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus causes serious infections in humans and becomes resistant to increasing numbers of antibiotics. Our approach utilizing CD-HIT and BLASP in silico tools identified 133 and 134 genes in MRSA 252 strain and MRSA Mu50 strain respectively that are essential to pathogen survival with E-score < 10-4 and absent in the human genome with E-score < 10-3. The genes were further classified according to their known or hypothetical or putative functions annotated by NCBI RefSeq and/or Integr8-Inquisitor. A list of central energy metabolic enzymes, which either do not have human homologues or functionally differentiate themselves from their human counterparts through alternative catalytic mechanisms, were considered as promising antibiotic drug targets. We proposed that the development of central energy metabolic inhibitors is a novel approach to avoid antibiotic resistance.

Pages: 91 to 99

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: May 22, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4383

ISBN: 978-1-61208-137-3

Location: Venice/Mestre, Italy

Dates: from May 22, 2011 to May 27, 2011