Properties and identification of antibiotic drug targets.

Background: We analysed 48 non-redundant antibiotic target proteins from all bacteria, 22 antibiotic target proteins from E. coli only and 4243 non-drug targets from E. coli to identify differences in their properties and to predict new potential drug targets.

Properties and identification of human protein drug targets.

Motivation: We analysed 148 human drug target proteins and 3573 non-drug targets to identify differences in their properties and to predict new potential drug targets.

Results: Drug targets are rare in organelles; they are more likely to be enzymes, particularly oxidoreductases, transferases or lyases and not ligases; they are involved in binding, signalling and communication; they are secreted; and have long lifetimes, shown by lack of PEST signals and the presence of N-glycosylation. This can be summarized into eight key properties that are desirable in a human drug target, namely: high hydrophobicity, high length, SignalP motif present, no PEST motif, more than two N-glycosylated amino acids, not more than one O-glycosylated Ser, low pI and membrane location.

Quick gene expression profiling of promyelocytic cell line HL-60.

Objective: A number of techniques have been developed to perform gene expression profiling. We report preliminary results from our exploratory study, using sequential analysis of gene expression (SAGE) technique, to profile the undifferentiated and differentiated HL-60 cells in line with our interest to characterize the cancer phenotype. The aim of the study is to evaluate the technique and to understand the molecular bases of these 2 states of cells.