Delineating the Plausible Molecular Vaccine Candidates and Drug Targets of Multidrug-Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii

Nosocomial infections have become alarming with the increase of multidrug resistant bacterial strains of Acinetobacter baumannii. Being the causative agent in approximately 80% of the cases, these pathogenic gram-negative species could be deadly for hospitalized patients, especially in intensive care units utilizing ventilators, urinary catheters and nasogastric tubes. Primarily infecting an immuno-compromised system, they are resistant to most antibiotics and are the root cause of various types of opportunistic infections including but not limited to septicemia, endocarditis, meningitis, pneumonia, skin and wound sepsis and even urinary tract infections. Conventional experimental methods including typing, computational methods encompassing comparative genomics and combined methods of reverse vaccinology and proteomics had been proposed to differentiate and develop vaccines and/or drugs for several outbreak strains. However, identifying proteins suitable enough to be posed as drug targets and/or molecular vaccines against the multidrug resistant pathogenic bacterial strains has probably remained an open issue to address. In these cases of novel protein identification, either the targets are uncharacterized or have been unable to confer the most coveted protection either in the form of molecular vaccine candidates or as drug targets. Here, we report a strategic approach with the 3766 proteins from the whole genome of A. baumannii ATCC19606 (AB) to rationally identify plausible...
Source: Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology - Category: Microbiology Source Type: research