Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

This interdisciplinary thesis investigates Clostridium botulinum and botulism disease, spanning molecular biology, epidemiology, bioinformatics as well as clinical diagnosis and treatment. It delves into the morphology, genetics and environmental distribution of Clostridium botulinum, highlighting its adaptive strategies and spore formation and germination. This research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of botulinum toxins, BoNT A-G by application of bioinformatic strategies to information gathering, information analysis and in silica methods, when researching protein interactions involved in intoxication. This study conducted a representative selection of BoNT strands, to visualise in silica relationship between toxins classified as BoNT A- G with a multiple sequence alignment of selected strands using Clustal O (1.2.3). Data was analysed for phylogenetic relationships among these strains. The results are organised, to highlight similarities and differences across the strains in relationship, providing figures for “Clustal highlight”, “Positive”, “Negative” and “Hydrophobicity” regions in sequences. Data collection included analysis of available data from different databases such as NCBI, PDB and UniProt. Protein structure of the BoNT/A Hall strain, protein database entry 2nyy, was visualized using PDB and BioPython.