HOME JOURNALS CONTACT

Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Potential Use of Banana Lectin to Detect or Cure Ebola Virus
Rungsang Nakrumpai

Abstract: To investigate protein, protein interactions between banana lectin and Ebola virus glycoprotein (Ebola GP). As snowdrop lectin was previously shown that it could bind to Ebola GP and removed Ebola virus from the patient’s blood, thus, its interactions with Ebola GP were also investigated and used as a reference. Structures of Ebola virus glycoprotein and the two lectins were downloaded from PDB. Non-amino acid atoms were removed. The resulted structures were then energy minimized protein-protein dockings between Ebola GP and each of the lectins were subsequently studied. The correctness of the docking results from various methods was investigated using structure superposition method Interactions between Ebola GP and each of the lectins in the docked results were then investigated. Ebola glycoprotein bound preferably to banana lectin. Although, it is a dimeric protein, it could bind Ebola GP relatively well, compared to the binding of tetrameric snowdrop lectin to Ebola GP. Various amino acid residues were found to contribute to the interactions between Ebola GP and the two lectins. The results suggested the potential use of banana lectin in detecting Ebola virus or curing Ebola virus disease.

How to cite this article
Rungsang Nakrumpai , 2017. Potential Use of Banana Lectin to Detect or Cure Ebola Virus. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 12: 5863-5866.

© Medwell Journals. All Rights Reserved