Designing of Short Interfering RNAS (siRNAs) for Tuberculosis

Abstract

The control of Tuberculosis is an obstacle that many researchers have been trying to overcome from several decades, as it remains the cause of millions of deaths per year. Though there are several drugs available but due to drug resistance, there is an extensive need of new and effective ways of treatment. Computational study was performed to design siRNA for the genes atpG, dnaK and htpG as all these genes are important for the survival of bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Multiple sequence alignment was done using Mega X software on the coding sequences (cds) of studied Mtb strains, which were retrieved from the NCBI database. The i-score designer was used for designing of potent siRNA. The SMEpred webserver was used to validate the data collected from the i-score designer, which was further used to calculate the efficacy as well as to predict the chemically modified siRNA (cm-siRNA). Results show that the studied genes were conserved in all the studied strains. MFE was calculated using RNAfold server and sequences with the lowest MFE was selected, as they are proved to have higher stability. This result can be used to develop novel therapeutic applications.