Title:Dengue Fever Virus Envelope Glycoproteins Variability Characterized
Bioinformatically
Volume: 19
Issue: 9
Author(s): Carlos Polanco*, Vladimir N. Uversky, Alberto Huberman, Enrique Hernandez-Lemus, Martha Rios Castro, Erika Jeannette López Oliva, Mireya Martínez-Garcia, Thomas Buhse, Francisco J. Roldan Gomez, Gilberto Vargas-Alarcon, Cecilia Zazueta and Claudia Pimentel-Hernández
Affiliation:
- Department of Electromechanical Instrumentation, Instituto Nacional de Cardiología "Ignacio Chávez", Mexico City,
14080, Mexico
- Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Sciences, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico
City, 04510, Mexico
Keywords:
Dengue, DENV gene, DENV mutant protein, dengue envelop glycoprotein, structural proteomics, bioinformatics, intrinsic disorder predisposition, polarity index method, polarity index method 2.0 v profile.
Abstract:
Background: The infection caused by the dengue fever virus is a severe threat to public
health on a global scale; nevertheless, there is currently no effective medical treatment or vaccine
available to prevent or treat the condition.
Objective: To better understand the physicochemical regularities of these proteins, it is necessary to
carry out a computational multiparametric study of the amino acid sequences of envelope proteins
expressed by the dengue fever virus and obtain a bioinformatics method that can use the subsequences
of the training protein group to figure out the preponderant function of a protein, up to its
sequence.
Methods: Essentially, at the amino acid level, various computational programs were applied to the
sequences expressing the dengue virus envelope glycoproteins to determine the PIM 2.0 v profile
and the Protein Intrinsic Disorder Predisposition (PIDP) profile of each protein, and then, at the nucleotide
level, a set of programs for genomic analysis was applied. Finally, these results were contrasted
with statistical tests.
Results: The re-creation of structural morphological similarities provided by specific regularities in the
PIM 2.0 v profile and PIDP of the proteins from diverse dengue fever virus envelopes made it possible
to propose a computer method that employs the PIM 2.0 v profile to identify this group of proteins
based on their sequences; based on our findings, this method is a "fingerprint" of this protein group.
Conclusion: The typical PIM 2.0 v profiles of the dengue fever virus proteins might be reproduced
by computational tools. This knowledge will be helpful in gaining a better understanding of the newly
discovered virus. Moreover, the method introduced here can identify, from the sequence, the
predominant function of the protein.
