Pangenome profiling of novel drug target against vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium

Enterococcus faecium is a frequent causative agent of nosocomial infection mainly acquired from outgoing hospital patients (Hospital Acquired Infection-HAIs). They are largely involved in the outbreaks of bacteremia, UTI, and endocarditis with a high transmissibility rate. The recent emergence of VRE strain (i.e. vancomycin resistant enterococcus) turned it into high priority pathogen for which new drug research is of dire need. Therefore, in current study, pangenome and resistome analyses were performed for available antibiotic-resistant genomes (n = 216) of E. faecium. It resulted in the prediction of around 5,059 genes as an accessory gene, 1,076 genes as core and 1,558 genes made up a unique genome fraction. Core genes common to all strains were further used for the identification of potent drug targets by applying subtractive genomics approach. Moreover, the COG functional analysis showed that these genomes are highly enriched in metabolic pathways such as in translational, ribosomal, proteins, carbohydrates and nucleotide transport metabolism. Through subtractive genomics it was observed that 431 proteins were non-homologous to the human proteome, 166 identified as essential for pathogen survival while 26 as potential and unique therapeutic targets. Finally, 3-dehydroquinate dehydrogenase was proposed as a potent drug target for further therapeutic candidate identification. Moreover, the molecular docking and dynamic simulation technique were applied to performed a virtual screening of natural product libraries (i.e., TCM and Ayurvedic compounds) along with 3-amino-4,5-dihydroxy-cyclohex-1-enecarboxylate (DHS) as a standard compound to validate the study. Consequently, Argeloside I, Apigenin-7-O-gentiobioside (from Ayurvedic library), ZINC85571062, and ZINC85570908 (TCM library) compounds were identified as potential inhibitors of 3-dehydroquinate dehydrogenase. The study proposed new compounds as novel therapeutics, however, further experimental validation is needed as a follow-up.Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.