In-Silico Molecular Characterization of MST1 Protein

Abstract

Diabetes mellitus (DM), commonly referred to as diabetes, is a group of metabolic diseases in which there are high blood sugar levels over a prolonged period. Diabetes cases up to 422 million worldwide; India ranks among top 3 countries with diabetic population. Diabetes is due to either the pancreas not producing enough insulin or the cells of the body not responding properly to the insulin produced. Two distinct mechanisms are responsible for the death of ? cells one through ER stress induced death and the other being cytokine mediated death via apoptosis. Various literature and the molecular pathways emphasizes the involvement of one major protein for ? cell death named as MST-1. Mammalian Sterile-20-like kinase (MST1, also known as STK4, KRS2) is an ubiquitously expressed serine/threonine kinase, it is part of the Hippo signaling pathway and involved in multiple cellular processes such as morphogenesis, proliferation, stress response and apoptosis. Hence our present investigations focus mainly to understand the detailed molecular features of MST-1 by retrieving its protein sequence from major protein sequence repository, analysing the physico-chemical properties, secondary structural elements and tertiary structure prediction using various databases, tools and techniques of bioinformatics.