Title

Authors

Affiliation

SCMS Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology Research and Development, South Kalamassery, Cochin- 682033, India

Email

mohankumar@scmsgroup.org; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received May 18, 2011; Accepted June 01, 2011; Published June 23, 2011

The Bos indicus Vechur breed cow milk is known for its medicinal value and the breed is listed under the category of critically maintained breeds by the Food and Agriculture Organization. The lactoferrin protein in milk is known for its nutritional value. Gene polymorphisms have been reported for Bovine lactoferrin. Mutations in the evolutionarily conserved sites tend to impair protein function and are related with the physicochemical difference between the known variants with 11 SNPs within the wild type. Structural differences are located due to these SNPs that may lead to functional variations. The structural variation is seen primarily in the first 48 residues at 5� end in all the samples modelled. Out of 11 SNPs 5 amino acid variations fall under alpha helix and beta sheet region, this might be of functional significance. This result may provide evidence that the SNPs detected in lactoferrin gene might have potential effects on milk composition. Our result demonstrates one major domain that could be a common binding pocket to all the samples, and important as an active site common to all the breeds that could be utilized for effective drug designing. Moreover, at some SNP positions in Vechur breed, antimicrobial peptides were located indicating importance of those residues for enhanced antimicrobial activity in lactoferrin of Vechur breed. Second binding pocket found in N- lobe region with the three required residues aspartic acid, histidine and tyrosine for iron binding, was considered as major binding site.

Keywords

Vechur; Critical Breed; Lactoferrin; Bioinformatics; SNP.

Citation

Shashidharan et al. Bioinformation 6(7): 275-278 (2011)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.