Designing synthetic drugs against Plasmodium falciparum: a computational study of histone-lysine N-methyltransferase (PfHKMT)

Abstract

Histone lysine methyltransferase (HKMT) are histone-modifying enzymes that catalyze the transfer of methyl groups to lysine and arginine residues of histone protein. HKMTs have been involved in transcriptional regulation of various proteins in organisms. Malaria parasite also has HKMT, which plays a major role in parasite development and pathogenesis and also in regulation of various biological process and pathways. Our aim is to study fundamental biology of key molecules involved in the survival of Plasmodium falciparum and use these to develop efficient synthetic peptides and chemical compounds. As a first step in this direction, we computationally predicted the three-dimensional structure of HKMT of P. falciparum (PfHKMT) by using iterative threading assembly refinement. The PfHKMT three-dimensional model was validated using PROCHECK and docked with known HKMT inhibitor Bix01294 using Autodock. Our initial results are encouraging and indicate that structural analysis of PfHKMT could be important in developing novel synthetic molecules against malaria.