European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

IN SILICO DRUG TARGETING AGAINST EREMOTHECIUM GOSSYPII USING PLANT-BASED BIOACTIVE COMPOUNDS

Chaitanya A. Borkar and Rupesh S. Badere*

ABSTRACT

We report the findings of drug targeting studies carried-out to identify the plant-derived molecule against the Eremothecium gossypii responsible for stigmatomycosis in cotton. Initially, we predicted the essential genes in E. gossypii by training the machine classifier employing the data from S. cerevisiae using seventeen genome features. Later, we selected the essential genes, whose products localize in the plasma membrane, for molecular docking of plant-derived drugs viz., azadirachtin, cleistanthin A, cleistanthin B, daturine, embelin and nicotine. The studies showed maximum interaction between cleistanthin B and plasma membrane ATPase of the pathogen.

Keywords: BLAST, essential genes, machine learning, molecular docking.