Ethnobotanical Leaflets 13:639-47, 2009.
Adenosine deaminase from Plasmodium falciparum as a Potential Drug Target in Anti- Malarial Drug Designing:
A Bioinformatic Approach
S. Sriram*, J. Kavitha Srilakshmi, V. Meenaa and C. Sasikumar
PG Department of
Biotechnology,
*Corresponding author
: Email: sriram_242003@yahoo.co.in
Issued
Absract
Parasites
are responsible for a wide variety of infectious diseases causing an enormous
health and economical blight. Malaria is one such prominent disease that causes
widespread infections in humans and results in innumerable deaths annually. The
development of resistance of the malarial parasites to the conventional drugs
has signaled for an urgent need to design new drugs in an effective way and
also to identify and study new drug targets to combat this disease. The
rational design of a drug is usually based on the biochemical and physiological
differences between the pathogen and the host. So in this current study we
focus on the striking differences in the purine
metabolism of the malarial parasite Plasmodium
falciparum and that of the host. Based on this, we
submit a hypothesis on targeting a protein Adenosine deaminase
that plays an important role in the purine metabolism
of the parasite. In this study a synthetic and a natural drug were used and
their efficacy was compared and analyzed.
Keywords: Plasmodium falciparum,
Adenosine deaminase, Purine
pathway.
Background
Malaria (from medieval Italian: mala aria – bad air) formerly called as ague or marsh fever
is an infectious disease that causes about 350-500million infections in humans
and 1-3million deaths annually. This infectious disease is widespread in many
tropical, subtropical regions and mostly prevalent among young children in Sub
Saharan Africa [1]. Malaria is caused by a protozoa Plasmodium (Phylum Apicomplexa). In
humans malaria is caused by P. falciparum, P. malariae, P. ovale,
P. vivax, and P. knowlesi [2][3]. Among the Plasmodium protozoa, Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for
about 80% infections and 90% deaths [4]. The parasite’s primary hosts and
transmission vectors are female mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles and humans
act as intermediates.
The parasite is relatively protected from
attack by the body’s immune system because for most of its human life cycle it
resides within the liver and blood cells and is relatively invisible to immune
surveillance. Even though circulating infected blood cells are destroyed in the
spleen, the Plasmodium falciparum, to
avoid this fate displays adhesive proteins on the surface of the infected blood
cells to stick to the walls of small blood cells, thereby sequestering the
parasite from passing through the general circulation and spleen. Although the
The
present study is about a novel method of drug designing and identifying a drug
target based on the differences in the purine pathway
of the parasite and host. Unlike their mammalian host most parasites lack the
pathways for de novo purine biosysnthesis
and rely on the salvage pathway to meet their purine
demands [6]. In some cases there are sufficient distinctions between
corresponding enzymes of the purine salvage pathway
of the host and the parasite and that may be effectively utilized to design
specific inhibitors or targets to design antimalarial
drugs. Interestingly the first step in the purine
salvage pathway differ significantly between the malarial parasites and host.
In the malarial parasites, purines formed as products
of polyamine synthesis are recycled in a novel pathway in which methyl thioinosine is generated by Adenosine deaminase The enzyme Plasmodium falciparum purine
nucleoside phosphorylase converts both 5-
methyl thioinosine and inosine
to hypoxanthine and activates the purine pathway that
plays an important role in the life cycle of the malarial parasite [6]. We
submit an hypothesis on targeting and blocking the protein Adenosine deaminase that will inturn stop the purine pathway of
the parasite and may prove to be an effective step in controlling and combating
malaria.
Methodology
The sequence of the target protein
Adenosine deaminase was obtained from NCBI database
[7] and the Protein Data Bank (PDB) [8] was used for obtaining the 3D structure
of the desired protein. The tool BLAST was used for searching and finding the
correct template homologue of the target sequence [9]. Information about the
domain region, region of alignment and function of the domain of the protein
was retrieved from Pfam [10].
Homology
Modeling:
A bioinformatics tool MODELLER was used for
homology modeling of protein 3D
structure [11]. A template protein of known 3D structure with enough sequence
similarity to the target protein Adenosine deaminase
was selected and both the sequences were aligned. Using the alignments the
coordinates of the matching residues in the known structure were copied to the
unknown protein and the resulting model was evaluated using Combinatorial
Extension [12], ProQ server [13] and Ramachandran plot [14].
Ligands (drugs)
used for targeting the desired protein were drawn using the tool ACD Chemsketch [15]. The sketched structure was then converted
to 3D format and optimized to ascertain if the structure obtained was an
accurate format to favour docking. Inorder to proceed with the docking studies, the secondary
structure of the protein was retrieved from RCSB software through which the
active sites, the ligand binding sites and metal
binding sites were carefully analyzed. Using another software called WEBLAB
[16] hydrogen coordinates were added and docked with the drugs used in this
study namely Primaquine (synthetic drug) and
Quinine(natural drug). The process of docking was done using a software called
Results and
Discussion
The protein sequence of Adenosine deaminase was retrieved from the target base of NCBI and
the template selection was done using
The
built model was evaluated using Combinatorial Extension (CE), ProQ server and Ramachandran
plot. Combinatorial Extension is a database for 3D protein structure comparison
and alignment and was used to find out the superimposition of the template and
the model. ProQ is a neutral network based predictor
and was used to predict the quality of the protein model. Two quality measures
LG score and
Utility
A
pioneering approach of merging Bioinformatics and pharmaceutics has been
carried out in this hypothesis to study the mechanism of action of drugs in
treating life threatening infections like malaria and arrive at a long lasting,
safe and effective solution. Keeping in mind the amount of resistance that
malarial parasites have developed against conventional drugs, we have proposed
a new method of drug designing and target identification based on the purine pathway of the malarial parasite and we have also
compared the efficacy of a natural drug against the conventional synthetic drug
in treating malaria. We believe this approach will go a long way in helping
researches all over the world to find a effective and permanent solution in
eradicating malaria.
References
PICTORIAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TARGET
PROTEIN (Adenosine deaminase)
WITH A NATURAL DRUG