Singh Vijay, Singh Desh Deepak
Department of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology, Indian Institute of Advanced Research, Koba, Gandhinagar-382 007, Gujarat, India.
Exp Parasitol. 2008 Jan;118(1):139-45. doi: 10.1016/j.exppara.2007.07.006. Epub 2007 Aug 3.
The three Tritryps, the pathogenic protozoa, Leishmania major, Trypanosoma brucei and Trypanosoma cruzi use surface molecules among others to evolve strategies for evading the immune system and for their survival in the host systems. Since only 36% of the protein coding genes in L. major genome have a putative function ascribed to them, we undertook a genome analysis of L. major genome for identification of adhesin-like and other surface proteins from amongst these hypothetical sequences. Our analysis resulted in the identification of a total of 194 hits, 120 of which had a predicted transmembrane region, 56 had both a transmembrane and signal peptide region, 1 sequence had only a predicted signal peptide region whereas 17 sequences had neither of the two. Six protein sequences could be assigned a putative adhesin-like domain region based on the analysis. Hopefully future detailed experimental studies will elucidate more vividly the role of these hits in Leishmania pathogenesis.
三种锥虫属致病原生动物，即硕大利什曼原虫、布氏锥虫和克氏锥虫，利用表面分子等手段来制定逃避免疫系统及在宿主系统中生存的策略。由于硕大利什曼原虫基因组中只有36%的蛋白质编码基因具有推定功能，我们对硕大利什曼原虫基因组进行了分析，以便从这些假设序列中鉴定出黏附素样蛋白和其他表面蛋白。我们的分析共鉴定出194个匹配序列，其中120个具有预测的跨膜区域，56个同时具有跨膜和信号肽区域，1个序列仅具有预测的信号肽区域，而17个序列两者皆无。基于该分析，六个蛋白质序列可被指定为推定的黏附素样结构域区域。希望未来详细的实验研究能更清晰地阐明这些匹配序列在利什曼原虫致病机制中的作用。
