Application of genomics and proteomics for identification of bacterial gene products as potential vaccine candidates

The ability of bioinformatics to characterize genomic sequences from pathog enic bacteria for prediction of genes that may encode vaccine candidates, e .g. surface localized proteins, has been evaluated. By applying appropriate tools for genomic mining to the published sequence of Haemophilus influenz ae Rd genome, it was possible to identify a putative vaccine candidate, the outer membrane lipoprotein, P6. Proteomics complements genomics by offerin g abilities to rapidly identify the products of predicted genes, e.g. prote ins in outer membrane preparations. The ability to identify the P6 protein uniquely from entries in a sequence database from the expected peptide-mass fingerprint of P6 demonstrates the power of proteomics. The application of proteomics for identification of vaccine candidates for another pathogenic bacterium, Helicobacter pylori using two different approaches is described . The first involves rapid identification of a series of monoclonal antibod y reactive proteins from N-terminal sequence tags. The other approach invol ves identification of proteins in outer membrane preparations by 2-D electr ophoresis followed by trypsin digestion and peptide mass map analysis. Our combined studies demonstrate that utilization of genome sequences by applic ation of bioinformatics through genomics and proteomics can expedite the va ccine discovery process by rapidly providing a set of potential candidates for further testing. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.