Patel Seema, Patel Snigdha
Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics Research Center, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Dr, San Diego, CA 92182 USA.
Strand Life Sciences Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, Karnataka 560024 India.
Virusdisease. 2016 Sep;27(3):242-250. doi: 10.1007/s13337-016-0334-8. Epub 2016 Jul 30.
Ebola virus, a member of the family has caused immense morbidity and mortality in recent times, especially in West Africa. The infection characterized by chills, fever, diarrhea, and myalgia can progress to hemorrhage and death. Hence, it is a high priority area to better understand its biology in order to expedite vaccine development pipelines. In this regard, this study analyzes the domains in RNA polymerase of fifteen publicly-available Ebola isolates belonging to three strains (Zaire, Sudan and Reston). The protein FASTA sequences of the isolates belonging Zaire, Sudan and Reston strains were extracted from UniProt database and submitted to the interactive web tool SMART for the polymerase domain profiles. Subsequent in silico investigation furnished interesting results that sure can contribute to the understanding of Ebola pathogenesis. The key findings and patterns have been presented, and based on them hypotheses have been formulated for further empirical validation.
埃博拉病毒是该病毒家族的成员之一，近年来已导致极高的发病率和死亡率，尤其是在西非地区。其感染症状包括寒战、发热、腹泻和肌痛，病情可能发展为出血甚至死亡。因此，为加速疫苗研发进程，深入了解其生物学特性成为当务之急。在此方面，本研究分析了属于三种毒株（扎伊尔、苏丹和莱斯顿）的15种公开可得的埃博拉病毒分离株的RNA聚合酶结构域。从UniProt数据库中提取了扎伊尔、苏丹和莱斯顿毒株分离株的蛋白质FASTA序列，并提交至交互式网络工具SMART以获取聚合酶结构域图谱。随后的计算机模拟研究得出了有趣的结果，这些结果无疑有助于理解埃博拉病毒的发病机制。文中呈现了关键发现和模式，并基于此提出了假设以待进一步实证验证。
