Title

Authors

Affiliation

Department of Biotechnology, Haldia Institute of Technology, ICARE Complex, HIT Campus, P O- HIT, Haldia, Dist - Purba Medinipur-721657, WB, India.

Email

keya_sau@yahoo.co.in; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received October 24, 2012; Accepted October 27, 2012; Published December 08, 2012

The immergence and dissemination of multidrug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus in recent years have expedited the research on the discovery of novel anti-staphylococcal agents promptly. Bacteriophages have long been showing tremendous potentialities in curing the infections caused by various pathogenic bacteria including S. aureus. Thus far, only a few virulent bacteriophages, which do not carry any toxin-encoding gene but are capable of eradicating staphylococcal infections, were reported. Based on the codon usage analysis of sixteen S. aureus phages, previously three phages were suggested to be useful as the anti-staphylococcal agents. To search for additional S. aureus phages suitable for phage therapy, relative synonymous codon usage bias has been investigated in the protein-coding genes of forty new staphylococcal phages. All phages appeared to carry A and T ending codons. Several factors such as mutational pressure, translational selection and gene length seemed to be responsible for the codon usage variation in the phages. Codon usage indeed varied phage to phage. Of the phages, phages G1, Twort, 66 and Sap-2 may be extremely lytic in nature as majority of their genes possess high translational efficiency, indicating that these phages may be employed in curing staphylococcal infections.

Keywords

Staphylococcal phage, Synonymous codon usage, Translational selection, Mutational bias, Phage therapy.

Citation

Bishal et al. Bioinformation 8(24): 1187-1194 (2012)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.