Screening of broad spectrum natural pesticides against conserved target arginine kinase in cotton pests by molecular modeling.

Cotton is an economically important crop and its production is challenged by the diversity of pests and related insecticide resistance. Identification of the conserved target across the cotton pest will help to design broad spectrum insecticide. In this study, we have identified conserved sequences by Expressed Sequence Tag profiling from three cotton pests namely Aphis gossypii, Helicoverpa armigera, and Spodoptera exigua. One target protein arginine kinase having a key role in insect physiology and energy metabolism was studied further using homology modeling, virtual screening, molecular docking, and molecular dynamics simulation to identify potential biopesticide compounds from the Zinc natural database. We have identified four compounds having excellent inhibitor potential against the identified broad spectrum target which are highly specific to invertebrates.

Combined pharmacophore, virtual screening and molecular dynamics studies to identify Bruton's tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

Bruton's tyrosine Kinase (BTK) is a cytoplasmic, non-receptor tyrosine kinase expressed in hematopoietic cells. BTK plays a critical role in many cellular signalling pathways making it a potential target to treat autoimmune diseases and cancer. BTK signalling is important for the production of arthritis-associated antibodies, and inhibiting BTK will help the system to block the production of disease-associated antibodies. In this study, we have implemented ligand-based pharmacophore modelling and virtual screening against natural compounds followed by molecular docking, density functional theory and molecular dynamics studies for 50 ns. Four compounds with high affinity towards BTK were identified, and it could be used as a potent lead molecule for designing BTK inhibitor.

SeeHaBITaT: A server on bioinformatics applications for Tospoviruses and other species.

Plant viruses are important limiting factors in agricultural productivity. Tospovirus is one of the severe plant pathogens, causing damage to economically important food and ornamental crops worldwide through thrips as vectors. Database application resources exclusively on this virus would help to design better control measures, which aren't available. SeeHaBITaT is a unique and exclusive web based server providing work bench to perform computational research on tospoviruses and its species. SeeHaBITaT hosts Tospoviruses specific database Togribase, MOLBIT, SRMBIT and SS with PDB. These applications would be of immense help to the Tospovirus scientific community. The server could be accessed at http://bit.srmuniv.ac.in/.

Identification and conformational analysis of putative microRNAs in Maruca vitrata (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae).

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small RNAs, evolutionarily conserved endogenous non-coding RNAs that regulate their target mRNA expression by either inactivating or degrading mRNA genes; thus playing an important role in the growth and development of an organism. Maruca vitrata is an insect pest of leguminous plants like pigeon pea, cowpea and mung bean and is pantropical. In this study, we perform BLAST on all known miRNAs against the transcriptome data of M. vitrata and thirteen miRNAs were identified. These miRNAs were characterised and their target genes were identified using TargetScan and were functionally annotated using FlyBase. The importance of the structure of pre-miRNA in the Drosha activity led to study the backbone torsion angles of predicted pre-miRNAs (mvi-miR-9751, mvi-miR-649-3p, mvi-miR-4057 and mvi-miR-1271) to identify various nucleotide triplets that contribute to the variation of torsion angle values at various structural motifs of a pre-miRNA.