Bioinformatics analysis of Uncyclotides: a potential antimicrobial peptide to protect against heart failure diseases

Abstract

Heart failure (also known as HF) is a clinical disorder triggered by functional and structural defects in cardiac muscles causing blood ejection or damage of ventricular filling. Even though the progression in the field of medicine, HF control, which generally presents as a syndrome, has been a task to healthcare sources. This is reproduced by the comparatively higher ration of readmissions with enhanced disease and death linked with HF. Congestive heart failure is also linked with expressional changes of human uncoupling protein proteins. So, we need to tackle the heart failure problem with the help of bioinformatics analysis. In this study, we retrieved three antimicrobial peptides (Cathelicidins, CRAMP and Uncyclotides) and four human uncoupling proteins (UCP 1, UCP 2, UCP 3 & UCP 4) from DRAMP and NCBI web server. Physiochemical properties and domains analysis of UCPs and antimicrobial peptides was performed by using Protparam, DRAMP and InterPro databases correspondingly. To predict the UCPs structure, homology modelling was performed by SWISS-MODEL server and structural assessment was done by Ramachandran plots. We detected the best antimicrobial peptide (Uncyclotides) against heart failure diseases after HPEPDOCK analysis. We also confirmed stability of UCP 1-Uncyclotides complex, and shown the slight distortion of the deformability plot supported by highest eigenvalues after Molecular Dynamics analysis. Therefore, this in silico approach identifies potential antimicrobial peptides "Uncyclotides" (acts as inhibitors) of heart failure diseases, which have to be confirmed further after experimental and clinical trials.