Background:
Acinetobacter baumannii is an important nosocomial pathogen with
great ability to resist antibiotics. Tandem repeat proteins, abundant in prokaryotic proteomes,
attract attention due to their role in virulence and various biological processes. Defining repeat-
containing proteins may pave the way to find novel therapeutic targets as well as vaccine
candidate and give pieces of evidence of mechanisms of evolution and adaptation of organisms
to various environmental conditions.
Objective:
In the present study, we employed bioinformatics tools to define repeatcontaining
proteins within A. baumannii proteome for emphasizing the existence of natural
sources for synthesizing novel therapeutic and diagnosis material.
Results:
We defined various kinds of repeat modules in a number of proteins and compared
the abundance of these proteins in some closely related species. No significant difference
was observed in the count of repeat-containing proteins in different species. But the existence
of some important virulence factors is mentionable in our screening.
Conclusion:
Repeat containing proteins are important biological determinants of A. baumannii
and are well worth researching for finding drug targets and vaccine candidates. These
proteins can be served as a template for designing and synthesizing peptides for therapeutic
and diagnostic approaches.
Pentapeptide-repeat proteins that act as topoisomerase poison resistance factors have a common dimer interface
