Functional analysis and structure determination of alkaline protease from Aspergillus flavus.

Proteases are one of the highest value commercial enzymes as they have broad applications in food, pharmaceutical, detergent, and dairy industries and serve as vital tools in determination of structure of proteins and polypeptides. Multiple application of these enzymes stimulated interest to discover them with novel properties and considerable advancement of basic research into these enzymes. A broad understanding of the active site of the enzyme and of the mechanism of its inactivation is essential for delineating its structure-function relationship. Primary structure analysis of alkaline protease showed 42% of its content to be alpha helix making it stable for three dimensional structure modeling. Homology model of alkaline protease has been constructed using the X-ray structure (3F7O) as a template and swiss model as the workspace. The model was validated by ProSA, SAVES, PROCHECK, PROSAII and RMSD. The results showed the final refined model is reliable. It has 53% amino acid sequence identity with the template, 0.24 Å as RMSD and has -7.53 as Z-score, the Ramachandran plot analysis showed that conformations for 83.4 % of amino acid residues are within the most favored regions and only 0.4% in the disallowed regions.

Pharmacological Screening of Annona cherimola for Antihyperlipidemic Potential.

High blood cholesterol levels are consistently associated with higher risk of coronary heart disease, and other life-threatening cardiovascular and cerebro-vascular damage, including fatal strokes. In the present study methanolic extract of Annona cherimola was evaluated for its antihyperlipidemic potential. Acute hyperlipidemia was induced by single administration of Triton WR 1339 (Tyloxapol) intra-peritoneally. There was a significant dose dependent decrease in plasma total cholesterol, triglycerides and LDL-cholesterol at the same time considerable increase in HDL-cholesterol levels upon administration of methanolic extract at the dose of 250 mg/kg and 500 mg/kg. Fenofibrate was used as reference standard. Atherogenic index as well as LDL/HDL cholesterol ratio was lowered significantly in case of methanolic extract treated groups compared to normal control which reflects the antihyperlipidemic potential of Annona cherimola.