A Systematic Strategy to Find Potential Therapeutic Targets for Pseudomonas aeruginosa Using Integrated Computational Models

Autor: Fernando Medeiros Filho, Ana Paula Barbosa do Nascimento, Maiana de Oliveira Cerqueira e Costa, Thiago Castanheira Merigueti, Marcio Argollo de Menezes, Marisa Fabiana Nicolás, Marcelo Trindade dos Santos, Ana Paula D’Alincourt Carvalho-Assef, Fabrício Alves Barbosa da Silva
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, Vol 8 (2021)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2296-889X
DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2021.728129
Popis: Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic human pathogen that has been a constant global health problem due to its ability to cause infection at different body sites and its resistance to a broad spectrum of clinically available antibiotics. The World Health Organization classified multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa among the top-ranked organisms that require urgent research and development of effective therapeutic options. Several approaches have been taken to achieve these goals, but they all depend on discovering potential drug targets. The large amount of data obtained from sequencing technologies has been used to create computational models of organisms, which provide a powerful tool for better understanding their biological behavior. In the present work, we applied a method to integrate transcriptome data with genome-scale metabolic networks of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We submitted both metabolic and integrated models to dynamic simulations and compared their performance with published in vitro growth curves. In addition, we used these models to identify potential therapeutic targets and compared the results to analyze the assumption that computational models enriched with biological measurements can provide more selective and (or) specific predictions. Our results demonstrate that dynamic simulations from integrated models result in more accurate growth curves and flux distribution more coherent with biological observations. Moreover, identifying drug targets from integrated models is more selective as the predicted genes were a subset of those found in the metabolic models. Our analysis resulted in the identification of 26 non-host homologous targets. Among them, we highlighted five top-ranked genes based on lesser conservation with the human microbiome. Overall, some of the genes identified in this work have already been proposed by different approaches and (or) are already investigated as targets to antimicrobial compounds, reinforcing the benefit of using integrated models as a starting point to selecting biologically relevant therapeutic targets.
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