Virtual Screening and Docking Studies of Identified Potential Drug Target: Polysaccharide Deacetylase in Bacillus anthracis

In recent years, insilico approaches have been predicting novel drug targets. The present day development in pharmaceutics mainly ponders on target based drugs and this has been aided by structure based drug designing and subtractive genomics. In the present study, the computational genome subtraction methodology was applied for identification of novel, potential drug target against Bacillus anthracis, cause of deadly anthrax. The potential drug target identified through subtractive genomics approach was considered as polysaccharide deacetylase. By virtual screening against NCI database and Drugbank chemical libraries, two potential lead molecules were predicted. Further the potential lead molecules and target protein were subjected for docking studies using Autodock.