Poster Presentation The 45th Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function 2020

Aspergillus fumigatus structural genomics: an insight into promising antifungal targets (#512)

Stephanie Nguyen 1 , Blagojce Jovcevski 1 , Tara L Pukala 1 , John B Bruning 1
  1. The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SOUTH AUSTRALIA, Australia

Aspergillus fumigatus is an opportunistic fungal pathogen and is the main etiological agent of invasive aspergillosis. In immunocompromised patients, it has an unacceptably high mortality rate of up to 95%. A structural genomics pipeline has been set up to facilitate the determination and analysis of structures of proteins from A. fumigatus. Since its inception in 2014, we have contributed 15% of all A. fumigatus structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank. Three recent structures solved from this project are nucleoside diphosphate kinase, an essential enzyme involved in DNA synthesis; enolase, an enzyme that catalyses the penultimate step of glycolysis; and guanosine monophosphate synthetase, an enzyme essential for virulence in A. fumigatus. This provides a solid foundation for identifying novel targets for structure-based drug design and lead optimisation to treat invasive aspergillosis infections.