Cheminformatics and Computational Chemical Biology

Biography

Biography: Elisa Fasoli

Abstract

Panax ginseng is a well-known Asian traditional herbal medicine, belonging to the genus Panax of the family Araliaceae, traditionally considered as a panacea, capable of treating all kinds of diseases. The present study aims at characterizing the Panax ginseng proteome in order to correlate protein properties with protective functions attributed to root by traditional oriental medicine. The Panax ginseng proteins were extracted from root powder and captured by using the combinatorial peptide ligand library technology. After SDS-PAGE separation, proteins were identified by nLC-MS/MS, by using an Orbitrap mass spectrometer, in order to extensively map the proteome for a consequent exploration of protein functions via Gene Ontology analysis. Moreover, also an interactomic map was built up by exploiting the STRING v.9.1 software, set on Arabidopsis Thaliana as organism database and a final peptidome analysis was performed by an in-silico human gastrointestinal digestion (Software ProteinProspector v 5.14.0, MS-Digest program set on UniProtKB Database). The proteomic fingerprinting of Panax gingseng yielded 209 unique gene products, searched in Uniprot_Arabidopsis Thaliana and Uniprot_Panax, with a prevalence of structural proteins and species connected with metabolic functions. The protein-protein interaction network was formed by 196 nodes and 1554 interactions and from all generated peptides (660), 6 have demonstrated a potential antimicrobial action. The present study has contributed not only to map the Panax ginseng proteome and its peptidome, but also to correlate proteomic data with biological functions in order to understand the medical properties that have made so popular this root in traditional oriental medicine.