SUBTRACTIVE GENOMICS APPROCH TO IDENTIFY POTENTIAL THERAPEUTIC TARGETS IN LEISHMANIA DONOVANI

Abstract

Availability of gene and protein sequences of parasite has provided a remarkable amount of data that
can be useful in drug target identification and vaccine development. Although extensive researches
are on way in order to control the disease caused by eukaryotic parasites and to develop drug(s)
against them, till date no effective vaccine or specific drug is available. Subtractive genomics approach
is one of the recently adopted methodology in which the subtraction of sequence between the host and
parasite proteome provides information for a set of proteins that are likely to be essential to the
parasite but absent in the host. We have used the same methodology to analyse the proteome of the
human parasite Leishmania donovani .Our analysis showed that out of the 446 protein sequences of
the parasite, 29 represent unique to parasite and predicted as putative drug targets. 16 membrane, 5
nuclear, 3 cytoplasmic along with 2 mitochondrial are found to be the potential drug targets by using
subtractive genomics approach. The preliminary work presented here identifies a small subset of the L.
donovani proteome that might be investigated further for identifying potential drug and vaccine
candidate in this parasite.