Affiliations: Department of Biotechnology, Bengal College of
Engineering & Technology, Durgapur – 713 212, India | Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science,
Kolkata – 700 032, India
Abstract: Availability of genome sequences of pathogens has provided a
tremendous amount of information that can be useful in drug target and vaccine
target identification. One of the recently adopted strategies is based on a
subtractive genomics approach, in which the subtraction dataset between the
host and pathogen genome provides information for a set of genes that are
likely to be essential to the pathogen but absent in the host. This approach
has been used successfully in recent times to identify essential genes in
Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We have used the same methodology to analyse the whole
genome sequence of the human gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori. Our analysis
revealed that out of the 1590 coding sequences of the pathogen, 40 represent
essential genes that have no human homolog. We have further analysed these 40
genes by the protein sequence databases to list some 10 genes whose products
are possibly exposed on the pathogen surface. This preliminary work reported
here identifies a small subset of the Helicobacter proteome that might be
investigated further for identifying potential drug and vaccine targets in this
pathogen.