Functional Based Characterization of Hypothetical Proteins from Candida Auris to Discover Novel Drug Targets

Abstract

Candida auris is a Gram-negative bacterium that causes candidiasis in humans. C.auris infections are the most frequent among all communicable diseases. The Candida auris (CJI97) B11221_V1 strain of C. auris contains 5715 genes and three pseudogenes. Out of these genes, 5521 genes code for proteins while 37 for rRNA, 157 tRNA. The proteome of C. auris made of 4689 from 5521 proteins contains 161 Hypothetical proteins (HPs) that are subjected to functional characterization. This study aims to annotate the functions and the structures of these hypothetical protein sequences. After extensive analysis of all the HPs, we have successfully assigned functions to 95 HPs with high precision. The selected proteins were further analyzed on the basis of their physicochemical properties, functional and structural categorization using an integrated bioinformatics approach by means of amino acid sequence and structure based analysis. This study found that these hypothetical protein sequences belong to various classes of proteins which involves in enzymes activity, hydrolase activity, Amino-acid biosynthesis, binding proteins, virulence and other proteins. Hence, the present study may serve as a potential lead for developing inhibitors against drug-resistant Candida auris.