Abstract:
The main cause of hepatitis C is hepatitis C virus or HCV and for the cure of hepatitis C, NS3/4A protease has
been found an important and emerging target. A number of HCV NS3/4A protease inhibitors have been discovered
which have shown subsequent reduction in reducing the viral load leading to this infection however they are still
undergoing clinical trials for improvement. Bacterial proteases are of great pharmaceutical importance and have a key
role in various biological processes and in life cycle of several pathogens. The current study was planned to explore
hexapeptides derived from conserved regions of bacterial proteases for their potential in blocking the NS3 protease
activity of HCV which would finally inhibit HCV multiplication. For this, a novel protease gene nprB was isolated from
a thermophilic bacterium Streptomyces thermovulgaris and bioinformatics analyses were performed. PCR amplification
and sequencing of nprB gene indicated an open reading frame of 178 aa (20191.18 Dalton).The peptide GGVHIN was
the top ranked with minimum S-score of -17.21) followed by hexapeptides VDAHAN, GVGREA, GALNES and
VHINSS with their S-scores of -14.73, -13.78, -10.72 and -10.70, respectively. A phylogram was also reconstructed to
reveal evolutionary relationships of nprB with its various homologs. The provided data will serve as a background to
further reveal pharmaceutical and biotechnological importance of this novel protease gene from S. thermovulgaris in
future.
