Leish-ExP: a database of exclusive proteins from Leishmania parasite

Leishmaniasis is a complex disease caused by different species of genus Leishmania, which affects millions of people spanning over 88 countries causing extensive mortality and morbidity. Leishmaniasis exists in three clinical forms; cutaneous, mucocutaneous and visceral. Anti-leishmanial therapy is one of the challenging fields due to the presence of wide range of Leishmania species and host response against the pathogenic infection. Clinical survey reveals toxicity of drugs and trial compounds causing death among patients and predominant resistance to different class of antimonials among the leishmaniasis patient. Identification of appropriate target protein is a primary and important phase of drug development and Leishmania is a suitable system for targeted drug development as it branched out quite early from the higher eukaryotes like human. With the advancement of genomic era and availability of whole genome sequences of Leishmania species, relevant information on their respective genes and proteins are now easily extracted. Hence, in the current study, to aid the targeted drug therapy, an exhaustive whole genome scale comparative sequence analysis was performed to identify genes/proteins exclusive to Leishmania. Subsequently, further filtration was employed to identify the individual Leishmania species specific gene/proteins. Among such proteins, a considerable number was found to have no recognizable structure and functions. Hence, efforts were taken to characterize these Leishmania exclusive gene/proteins via providing additional sequence, structure, localization and functional information. All the information about each of these Leishmania exclusive gene/proteins from five different Leishmania species has been systemically categorized and represented in the form a user-friendly database called Leish-ExP, which is freely available at http://www.hpppi.iicb.res.in/Leish-ex.