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Tuberculosis (TB) caused mainly by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium bovis, is leading cause of morbidity and mortality responsible for more than 2 million deaths a year. Other human pathogens belonging to the Mycobacterium genus include Mycobacterium avium causing a TB-like disease especially in AIDS patients, and Mycobacterium leprae, the causative agent of leprosy. Mycobacterium ulcerans causes skin infections in human causing buruli ulcer. Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis belonging to MAC complex, is the causative agent of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis in humans. In immunocompromised patients, Mycobacterium abscessus can cause chronic lung disease, post-traumatic wound infections, and disseminated cutaneous diseases.
Salient Features of MycobacRV
- MycobacRV houses list of known mycobacterial vaccines from extensive literature survey.
MycobacRV also provides a detailed analysis of predicted adhesins and adhesin-like proteins from 22 human pathogenic mycobacterial species namely Mycobacterium abscessus ATCC 19977, Mycobacterium avium 104, Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis K-10, Mycobacterium bovis BCG str. Pasteur 1173P2, Mycobacterium bovis BCG str. Tokyo 172, Mycobacterium bovis AF2122/97, Mycobacterium intracellulare ATCC 13950, Mycobacterium leprae TN, Mycobacterium leprae Br4923, Mycobacterium tuberculosis 98-R604, Mycobacterium tuberculosis C, Mycobacterium tuberculosis CDC1551, Mycobacterium tuberculosis F11, Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv, Mycobacterium tuberculosis Haarlem, Mycobacterium tuberculosis KZN 1435, Mycobacterium tuberculosis KZN 4207, Mycobacterium tuberculosis KZN 605, Mycobacterium tuberculosis KZN R506, Mycobacterium tuberculosis KZN V2475, Mycobacterium tuberculosis W-148, Mycobacterium ulcerans Agy99 and non-pathogenic Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Ra selected by run of their proteomes on SPAAN adhesin predictor and Psortb (Subcellular Localization prediction Tool). The analysis includes various computational approaches to identify the number of paralogs, orthologs, number of transmembrane helices, signal peptides, beta wraps and topology of the protein. It also provides information about conserved domains present in the predicted adhesins and blastp results reflecting similarity to host proteins. MycobacRV also provides detailed epitope information for all the predicted adhesins. It contains the linear B cell epitope data obtained from ABCpred and Bcepred servers and discontinuous B cell epitope data from Discotope and BEpro servers. The T cell epitope data obtained from Propred, IEDB T Cell epitope prediction tools, NetMHC and Bimas servers are also present. - The Allergen data regarding the chances of the protein being an allergen obtained from AlgPred and Allermatch are also incorporated.
- This information, relevant from the view point of Reverse Vaccinology was further analyzed in R platform through a well structured decision tree reaching a set of most probable adhesin vaccine candidates.
- These data are important from reverse vaccinology view and will help the researchers in mycobacterial adhesin vaccine candidate identification process
The server also provides epitope conservation data for B cell and T cell epitopes. This data would be helpful for rational vaccine design studies for mycobacterium species. |
