Identification of Drug Target in Food Pathogen - Streptococcus Pyogenes

Streptococcus pyogenes (S.pyogenes) is the cause of many important human diseases, ranging from mild superficial skin infections to life-threatening systemic diseases. This pathogen of interest for the therapeutic drug target is the one causing contamination in food samples. The samples (contaminated vegetables) subjected to serial dilution was used as inoculums for the Nutrient agar (NA) plates that were further sub-cultured using streaking techniques. Pure colonies were isolated from the selective medium to isolate a particular strain in NA slants and subjected to Gas Chromatography (GC) for identification. The organism identified was S pyogenes. The entire set of proteins from this pathogen and the ones encoded in human genome were determined. Pyruvate kinase involved in carbohydrate metabolic pathway of S.pyogenes was chosen based on gene expression as a potential drug target candidate. This enzyme was further analyzed for protein structure prediction. Three protein inhibitor UDP D-Xululose was selected and screened for the inhibitor study using protein ligand docking program Genetic Optimisation of ligand Docking (GOLD). The docking studies proved that the inhibitors had better interactions with the drug targets and modeled proteins can be used as target sites for S pyogenes contaminations and this study is a modest approach towards target based drug designing.