Title: Exploring the functions and interactions of undeciphered proteins from Shigella flexneri

Authors: Sarmishta Mukhopadhyay; Sayak Ganguli; Santanu Chakrabarti

Addresses: Department of Biotechnology, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata – 700016, India ' Department of Biotechnology, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata – 700016, India ' Department of Zoology, Government General Degree College, Singur, West Bengal – 712409, India

Abstract: : Multiple serotypes of Shigella and surfacing of antimicrobial resistant strains pose a serious threat in treating shigellosis. A significant proportion of the Shigella flexneri genome (18%) codes for Hypothetical Proteins (HPs), which may be involved in key cellular and signalling pathways, that play decisive role in pathogen survival and dissemination. This work employs a computational workflow to determine the family, domain, subcellular localisation and possible interacting partners of these unannotated proteins. The investigation could successfully assign functions to 432 HPs from Shigella flexneri genome and classified them into 20 different groups in accordance with their functions. Enzymes being the most prevalent group, were further categorised into several classes depending on the reaction it catalyses. This work should serve as a reference pipeline for annotation of other HPs from pathogenic organisms and detailed experimental investigations of these annotated proteins should help us to identify novel therapeutic targets for future drug discovery.

Keywords: Shigella sp; shigellosis; hypothetical proteins; in-silico; therapeutic targets.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCBDD.2022.124772

International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2022 Vol.15 No.1, pp.60 - 75

Received: 26 Jun 2021
Accepted: 12 Apr 2022

Published online: 08 Aug 2022 *

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