Advances in Proteomics of Mycobacterium leprae

Abstract

Although Mycobacterium leprae was the first bacterial pathogen identified causing human disease, it remains one of the few that is non‐cultivable. Understanding the biology of M. leprae is one of the primary challenges in current leprosy research. Genomics has been extremely valuable, nonetheless, functional proteins are ultimately responsible for controlling most aspects of cellular functions, which in turn could facilitate parasitizing the host. Furthermore, bacterial proteins provide targets for most of the vaccines and immunodiagnostic tools. Better understanding of the proteomics of M. leprae could also help in developing new drugs against M. leprae. During the past nearly 15 years, there have been several developments towards the identification of M. leprae proteins employing contemporary proteomics tools. In this review, we discuss the knowledge gained on the biology and pathogenesis of M. leprae from current proteomic studies.

A Systems Level Comparison of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium smegmatis Based on Functional Interaction Network Analysis

“…We then combined these criteria with the requirement that the eigenvector centrality should be greater than 10−5. We obtained a set of 355 and 116 proteins which have a high centre of gravity and thus may be potentially interesting as drug targets in the MTB and MLP networks, respectively [40][41][42][43]. Interestingly, proteins belonging to the intermediary metabolism and respiration functional class are the most represented in these lists of potential drug targets as shown in Table S1 and Figure 1.…”

Progression of ‘Omics’ Methodologies for Understanding the Pathogenicity of Corynebacterium Pseudotuberculosis: The Brazilian Experience

“…Unlike genomic studies, proteomics evaluates the protein profile of a cell, tissue or organism [16, 17]. Proteomic studies can provide valuable information about changes in protein synthesis, post-translational modifications and protein-protein interactions, thereby increasing knowledge of physiological phenomena for a specific condition and helping to establish a fundamental understanding of an organism's cellular physiology and virulence factors [16, 18].…”