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From DrugPedia: A Wikipedia for Drug discovery

                                          Where are we standing?????????????????????

After 126 years, the etiological agent of deadly tuberculosis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis) has been discovered by Robert Koch, we have only one vaccine and few countable antibiotics against tuberculosis. Is this justifiable?

Recent estimates of Tuberculosis disease is approximately 1.86 billion people with 16.2 million cases of active diseases. (Dye etal.,1999). It’s a fact and I also support that not a single treatment but a combinatorial approach is required against this culprit. We are living in the age of biotechnology and Nanotechnology so we should look for molecular medicine which may be some involve synthetic molecules mimicking that in system approaches. Through this article I have tried to make people think about the computers, biomolecules and some naturally occurring compounds as a combinatorial approach to fight the evil like tuberculosis.

In my this article I am suggesting one of my idea although its very older approach which has been discovered in 20th century that is Antisense DNA technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisense_therapy). I have targeted the dna N gene (Gene ID 887092) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/viewer.fcgi?val=57116681 from 2052 to 3260) of Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv strain which is a DNA Polymerase III and is a complex, multi-chain enzyme responsible for most of the replicative process in bacteria. This DNA polymerase also exhibits 3' to 5' exonuclease activity.

A brief description of the method is as follows:

•The sequence of the dna N gene has been analyzed for GC rich region which is from 2152 to 2172 of coding region (Total length of dna N gene in the genome of Mycobacterium 2052 to 3260).

•The sequence was aligned with both the human genome (host of Mycobacterium tuberculosis) and Mycobacterium genome itself using the BLAST tool.

•It was found that there was no significant homology between the genome of human and the oligonucleotide we are going to use for Antisense against dna N gene. This shows that the oligo would act specifically against Mycobacterium.

•It was also observed that the oligo has homology with other gene of Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv strain.

•Then an expression vector (eg: pCS 105 vector modified by Duve Turner’s) has been designed that will produce the antisense against the transcribed portion of dna N gene.

•This vector has been transfected into the cell.

•The vector would transcribe the antisense and this antisense result in DNA/RNA hybrid and RNase H degrade that hybrid resulting in no translation and killing of our target.

References: Dye,C., Scheele,S., Dolin,P., Pathania,V., and Raviglione,R.C. (1999). Global burden of tuberculosis—estimated incidence, prevalence, and mortality by country. J. Am. Med. Assn. 282,677–686