Abstract

INSILICO STRUCTURE PREDICTION OF ORF61 GENE RESPONSIBLE FOR CHICKEN POX

Abstract

Bioinformatics can be used to develop and improve methods for storage, retrieval, organization and analysis of biological data. A major activity in bioinformatics is to develop software tools to generate useful biological knowledge. Techniques of image and signal processing allow extraction of useful result from large amount of raw data. In this study work has been done on ORF61 gene that is responsible for causing chicken pox which is a highly contagious disease caused by primary infection of Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV). It usually starts with vascicular skin rash mainly on the body and head rather than at the periphery and becomes itchy. The early symptoms in children and adults are nausea, loss of appetite, aching and headache. VZV genes ORF4, ORF61 and ORF62 modulate the expression of the VZV genes of different kinetic classes in human T lymphocytes cell lines. The complete sequential, functional and structural information of all the VZV genes were obtained using different biological databases. The blast result gave 11% similarity. As the structure was not available in PDB, molecular modeling with 4 templates were done. 10 target models were generated out of which target model no. 7 with best dope score (-32793.12109) for structure prediction.

Keywords: Molecular Modeling, Chicken Pox, ORF61, VZV genes, PDB