Study of Drug Resistance and identification of Novel Drug Targets in Mycobacterium Tuberculosis

Abstract

Study of Drug Resistance and identification of Novel Drug Targets in Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (July 2013 - May 2014) Brief description: An alarming emergence of multidrug-resistance and emerging total drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and continuing high worldwide incidence of tuberculosis has invigorated the search for novel drug targets. Basically this project attempts to understand the mechanism behind the drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and on the basis of this, finding out such novel drug targets that are crucial for Mycobacterium by using Computational Techniques. This work accomplished two major objectives. First, the structure of novel drug targets (FadH, Murl, Asps and Pks13) was deduced computationally through homology modeling using the templates from bacterial homologues. Second, potent candidate inhibitors against these targets were identified through docking against already known inhibitors in other organisms or by using drug database. For this, various Bioinformatics software and tools are used like Discovery Studio, Gromacs, Easy Modeller, Zinc Database etc.