Characterization of a hemolytic and antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain S3 pathogenic to fish isolated from Mahananda River in India.

Virulent strain Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolated from Mahananda River exhibited the highest hemolytic activity and virulence factors and was pathogenic to fish as clinical signs of hemorrhagic spots, loss of scales, and fin erosions were found. S3 was cytotoxic to the human liver cell line (WRL-68) in the trypan blue dye exclusion assay. Genotype characterization using whole genome analysis showed that S3 was similar to P. aeruginosa PAO1. The draft genome sequence had an estimated length of 62,69,783 bp, a GC content of 66.3%, and contained 5916 coding sequences. Eight genes across the genome were predicted to be related to hemolysin action. Antibiotic resistance genes such as class C and class D beta-lactamases, fosA, APH, and catB were detected, along with the strong presence of multiple efflux system genes. This study shows that river water is contaminated by pathogenic P. aeruginosa harboring an array of virulence and antibiotic resistance genes which warrants periodic monitoring to prevent disease outbreaks.

Intelligent Access to Sequence and Structure Databases (IASSD) - an interface for accessing information from major web databases.

UNLABELLED: With the advent of age of big data and advances in high throughput technology accessing data has become one of the most important step in the entire knowledge discovery process. Most users are not able to decipher the query result that is obtained when non specific keywords or a combination of keywords are used. Intelligent access to sequence and structure databases (IASSD) is a desktop application for windows operating system. It is written in Java and utilizes the web service description language (wsdl) files and Jar files of E-utilities of various databases such as National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and Protein Data Bank (PDB). Apart from that IASSD allows the user to view protein structure using a JMOL application which supports conditional editing. AVAILABILITY: The Jar file is freely available through e-mail from the corresponding author.

Lysine richness in human snurps - possible sites for electrophilic attacks.

Gene-expression strategies are remodeled following exposure to stress. The reactive oxidants and electrophiles generated after stress actually affects the structural and functional properties of different cellular proteins. It is also seen that lysine rich motifs of proteins play crucial role in electrophilic attack and modification. Therefore, this study revealing lysine richness in 5 main human snrups (Small Nuclear Ribonucleoproteins) indicates a possible mechanism of gene regulation under stress. This possibility is highly supported by the findings that surface residues of the molecules were full of lysine rich clusters. Lysine richness is also found to be a highly conserved pattern across the various domains of life indicative of stress adaptation in the prebiotic to biotic world transition. Moreover the modeled structures showed good all atom contacts and minimal outliers.

In silico screening of herbal and nanoparticle lead compounds for effectivity against H5N1, H1N1 neuraminidase and telomerase.

BACKGROUND: Traditionally, drugs were discovered by testing compounds synthesized in time consuming multi-step processes against a battery of in vivo biological screens. Promising compounds were then further studied in development, where their pharmacokinetic properties, metabolism and potential toxicity were investigated. METHODS: Here we present a study on the most talked about herbal lead compounds and their potential binding affinity to the effector molecules of major disease causing agents, H5N1 and H1N1(Neuraminidase). The work also encompasses the screening of the nanoparticle compound - fullerene which have been reported to have anti HIV activity. Further studies were also performed with telomerase which has been the target of numerous anti cancer experiments. RESULTS: The results revealed that most herbal lead compounds were effective targets against H5N1 neuraminidase, namely baicalein was found to be an effective target for inhibiting the neuraminidase of H1N1 virus. Telomerase was found to be effectively bound by curcumin at the RNA binding interface. The study with nanoparticle fullerene also showed that it has the potential of serving as an effective ligand for inhibiting H1N1 neuraminidase and telomerase. CONCLUSION: Our data demonstrate that the new in silico screening method is highly efficient for identifying potential lead compounds against major infectious disease.