Construction of a comprehensive protein-protein interaction map for multi drug resistant klebsiella pneumoniae to identify drug targets: A computational approach.

Klebsiella pneumoniae is an encapsulated rod-shaped, Gram-negative microbe that can form biofilm. It is an opportunistic Enterobacter usually involved in nosocomial infection, conferring resistance to almost all antibiotics and hence become therapeutically challenging. In the current study, the Protein Interaction Network (PIN) of MDR K. pneumoniae has been identified. The proteins are the building blocks of all organisms. Proteins interact with each other to carry out their physiological functions. The interactions are integrated to form Protein Interaction Network (PIN). The strain DA48896 has been selected as it was isolated from Pakistan and harboring bla-oxa-181, conferring resistance to carbapenem. Total 20,936 high confidence interactions of 3782 proteins have been predicted from the STRING database. The predicted interactions were annotated functionally and mapped on their corresponding pathways. The predicted PIN was verified using semantic similarity between the Gene Ontology. The topological properties were calculated and retrieved topologically significant proteins consisting of 390 proteins. Among them 49 proteins are non-homologous essential that can serve as the potential drug targets. These proteins were further explored for druggability, their association with pathways involved in drug resistance and eventually prioritized as potential drug targets. This study will be helpful to design drug candidates against prioritized proteins.