Computational approach for investigating nuclear transport of Trypanosoma brucei

Trypanosoma brucei (T. brucei) is one of the frequent pathogens in human blood. To date, the nuclear transport in this parasite is still unelucidated. Thus, the present study is carried out to identify and characterize the T. brucei homologues of nuclear transport components using a series of bioinformatics tools. Prediction using computational approach has successfully identified 24 T. brucei homologues to be involved in the nuclear transport with the presence of functional domains and motifs such as GTP-binding domain, NUP C terminal domain, ARM repeat, HEAT repeat, CAS/CSE repeat, RCC1 repeat, Importin B N-terminal domain and Exportin domain. The mining protein interaction network has increased our system-level understanding of parasite nuclear transport. Therefore, our in silico approach has enabled rapid screening and identification of nuclear transport components for further characterization in the laboratory.