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New institute in tie-up for malaria vaccine

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE March 7. The Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB), at the International Technology Park Ltd. here, will collaborate with the School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, U.S., to find proteins that could be potential candidates for a malaria vaccine.

The institute was inaugurated at the ITPL on Friday by the Union Minister for Shipping, Shatrughan Sinha.

Akhilesh Pandey, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University, and Chief Scientific Officer of IOB, said he had started the institute in collaboration with the university and by investing about $200,000.

The IOB had tie-ups with the University of Michigan, U.S., and the University of South Denmark to build comprehensive reference databases of all known human proteins, and to conduct bioinformatics research, he added.

The IOB team will use a cluster of computers running on Linux to build a hierarchical database of proteins; the work is done using the open source software, Zope, a database management software, and Python, a computer language which can be used to build specific queries.

An important use of such applications is to narrow down the number of proteins that could be potential candidates for a malaria vaccine. Dr. Pandey said that now that the genomes of both the malaria microbe, plasmodium, and those of its vector, the Anopheles gambiae mosquito had been sequenced, work on a malaria vaccine had gained speed the world over.

The vaccine is to be made using proteins on the surface of the protozoa, plasmodium. Narrowing down the number of potential candidates from hundreds to about five will require injecting the antigen (protein) into mice and looking for antibodies. The more antibodies, the better will be the immune resistance to the disease.

So, the proteins which trigger the best immune reaction (i.e., stimulate the generation of most antibodies in the body) will be the ones to use to build vaccines. This part of the research is being done in several research labs in different parts of the world. The IOB hopes to collaborate with some of them; it will work on building databases using the research output from such organisations.

The National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) here will help determine the structure of such proteins. The NCBS has the mass spectrometers, X-ray crystallography units, and NMR spectrometers which are required, according to Dr. Pandey.

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