Publication

Abstract : Plant medicine has been used from the earlier civilization period. Many traditional phytomedicines have antibacterial and antifungal properties but only a few have been documented. Enicostemma littorale Blume is a traditional medicinal plant used to cure diabetes mellitus and also has antifungal properties which has been subjected to in silico analysis. Cell wall components are the important antifungal targets for drug designing and mannoproteins are glycoproteins which are involved in the cell wall synthesis, hence have been targeted as antifungal site. GWT1-anchoring protein has been identified as a novel antifungal target as inhibition of GWT1 protein will lead to growth inhibition and mislocalization of cell wall mannoproteins in fungi. Point mutation at residues G132R and V397I individually generate resistive properties against inhibitor BIQ (1-[4-butylbenzyl]isoquinoline). An in silico analysis was carried out to find the potential antifungal phytocompounds from E. littorale which was screened on the basis of high throughput virtual screening (HTVS) using Glide. The structure of the target was modeled and validated and the mutations were carried out using SwissPDB deep viewer. Molecular docking studies were carried out using Glide in XP method. The phytocompounds Laminaribitol, Isovitexin, Quercetin and Myricetin showed high interaction with wild as well as mutated, resistant type. The phytocompounds Isovitexin, Quercetin and Myricetin are flavonoids that exhibited good interactions with mutated GWT1 protein. Hence, it can be concluded that the phytocompounds from E.littorale could possibly be evaluated for drug resistant fungal strains.