In silico identification of vaccine and drug targets for Corynebacterium ulcerans and the recently described C. silvaticum

Abstract

The availability of complete genomes of pathogens enables in silico analyzes that can be used to develop new control methods, reducing the time, cost, and necessity of pathogen cultivation. In this study, we developed a novel pipeline for the prediction of common broad-spectrum drug and vaccine candidates against the diphtheria toxin producing Corynebacterium ulcerans and the recently described C. silvaticum species, considered as a zoonotic potential. We found four common, non-host homologous, virulent, essential cytoplasmic druggable proteins that belong to metabolic pathways and are involved in the regulation in other essential genes. In addition, the docking analysis showed natural compounds from the ZINC database as drug candidate against the target proteins. We also identified nine vaccine candidates involved in transport and regulation of permeability of substances important to the cell. We hypothesize that these identified therapeutic targets and antimicrobial drugs could be considered for prophylaxis and hence, should be subjected to further experimental validations. We suggest that the pipeline can be used on any pathogen.

PBITV3: A robust and comprehensive tool for screening pathogenic proteomes for drug targets and prioritizing vaccine candidates

“…Antigenic drug targets were further analyzed to predict vaccine candidates (Sah et al, 2020). Similar studies were performed using PBIT to screen pathogen proteomes of Serratia marcescens (Prado et al, 2022), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Rahman et al, 2023;Atron, 2023), Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (Kocabaş et al, 2022), Rickettsia (Felice et al, 2022), Corynebacterium ulcerans, Corynebacterium silvaticum (Cerqueira et al, 2022) to identify potential drug and vaccine targets. In addition to high-throughput analysis, individual proteins, such as MEP2 protein in Candida albicans (Khalil, 2020), have also been assessed for their safety through the non-homology modules of PBIT. )…”