Structural investigation and in-silico characterization of Plasmepsins from Plasmodium falciparum

Abstract

Malaria is the one most important parasitic disease of humans, which affects approximately one hundred countries and threatens half of the world’s population. The Plasmodium aspartic protease called plasmepsins performs a vital role in providing nutrients to the malaria parasite, which make these proteins as an excellent drug target. In this study, we have carried out a comparative protein modeling, active site analysis and structural analysis of all ten plasmepsins from Plasmodium falciparum. In this report we have analyzed in-silico structure modeling and made efforts to characterize plasmepsins structure and further propose its functional information. The phylogenetic analysis and disulfide linkages indicate, plasmepsin I to IV and HAP have similar structure, function property. Whereas, plasmepsin IX to X and plasmepsin VI to VIII belong to a separate cluster. The integral membrane protein plasmepsin V has a functional characterization as compared to the others aspartic proteases from Plasmodium falciparum. The overall study summarizes the need of good model to understand the structure and function activity and to design potent small molecule inhibitors targeting all ten plasmepsins, specifically Plasmepsin V as important target.