[Todos] SEMINARIO EXTRAORDINARIO QB 2014 - MIÉRCOLES 04 de junio 13:00 h - Guilherme Corrêa de Ol iveira

[Claudia Sepúlveda]

Estimados Colegas, junto al Dr. Adrián Turjanski tenemos el agrado de
invitarlos a este Seminario Extraordinario del Departamento de Química
Biológica.
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Miércoles 04 de junio a las 13:00 hs, Aula Cardini del Departamento de
Química Biológica, 4to piso.
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Expositor: Guilherme Corrêa de Oliveira
Genomics and Computational Biology Group, FIOCRUZ, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil

Título:
"Genomics for the development of new control tools for schistosomiasis".

Resumen:
There are three main species of Schistosoma that together infect over 200
million individuals, S. mansoni, S. haematobium and S. japonicum. Over
200.000 deaths are related to schistosomiasis infection every year.
Despite much effort, control remains essentially limited to the use of
Praziquantel, the only drug available to treat the disease. It is widely
recognized that new control tools such as new drugs and vaccines are
needed, in additional to sanitation, education and intermediate host
elimination. In addition new and more sensitive diagnostic tests are
needed. The fantastic advances in the field of genomics have opened new
perspectives for the development of new control tools. With this aim the
genomes of the three species have been sequenced. Efforts towards making
use of this resource are described for the development of new drugs and
identification of drugs and vaccine targets of interest will be discussed.
To make full use of the genomic data requires heavy computational
resources and bioinformatics skills not available in all laboratories. The
integration of large and distinct datasets readily available in a
user-friendly interface is of major relevance. For this reason SchistoDB
was developed. The database was structured using the Genomics Unified
Schema and contains a variety of tools that permits fast analysis by
similarity searches, protein characteristics, keywords, ontology
annotation and other types of data such as gene transcription profiles.
Metabolic analysis can also be carried out with SchistoCyc. Various drug
targets were computationally identified. We have focused on the study of
two families of proteins, kinases and histone modifying enzymes (HMEs).
HMEs act as key protein modifiers that influence gene expression by
regulating chromatin structure and are involved in a number of human
diseases. As a consequence there is significant effort towards developing
drug that inhibit HME activity. HME inhibitors affect parasite survival
and we explored these enzymes as anti-schistosome targets. To identify
targets of interest genes were invalidated by RNAi, protein structures
were determined and enzymatic assays developed to test new compounds. We
have developed compounds targeting different enzymes. One target is
SmHDAC8. SmHDAC8 gene silencing resulted in reduced worm and egg numbers.
Other targets under development are KDM1 / KDM2 e PRMT3. A second class of
proteins being studied for drug development is kinases. The kinome
complement of the S. mansoni genome was determined. Gene silencing of
SmRas, SmERK1, SmERK2, SmJNK and SmCaMK2 indicated that those in the MAPK
pathway are important for parasite development and reproduction.

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Los esperamos!

Martín Edreira
Diego Grinman
Diego Laderach
Claudia Sepúlveda

Organizadores de los Seminarios del Dpto Química Biológica, FCEN-UBA.


Puede consultarse la agenda de próximos seminarios en
http://www.qb.fcen.uba.ar/seminarios.html