Properties and identification of antibiotic drug targets

Background: We analysed 48 non-redundant antibiotic target proteins from all bacteria, 22 antibiotic target proteins from E. coli only and 4243 non-drug targets from E. coli to identify differences in their properties and to predict new potential drug targets. Results: When compared to non-targets, bacterial antibiotic targets tend to be long, have high -sheet and low -helix contents, are polar, are found in the cytoplasm rather than in membranes, and are usually enzymes, with ligases particularly favoured. Sequence features were used to build a support vector machine model for E. coli proteins, allowing the assignment of any sequence to the drug target or non-target classes, with an accuracy in the training set of 94%. We identified 319 proteins (7%) in the non-target set that have target-like properties, many of which have unknown function. 63 of these proteins have significant and undesirable similarity to a human protein, leaving 256 target like proteins that are not present in hu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Tala Bakheet, Andrew J. Doig
• Keywords: Antibiotic Targets, Bacteria, BMCBI 2010, Proteins