Abstract
Estrogen circulating in blood has been proved to be a strong biomarker for breast cancer. A β-glucuronidase enzyme (GUS) from human gastrointestinal tract (GIT) microbiota including probiotics has significant involvement in enhancing the estrogen concentration in blood through deconjugation of glucuronidated estrogens. The present project has been designed to explore GIT microbiome-encoded GUS enzymes (GUSOME) repertoire in normal human and breast cancer patients. For this purpose, a total of nineteen GUS enzymes from human GIT microbes, i.e., seven from healthy and twelve from breast cancer patients have been focused on. Protein sequences of enzymes retrieved from UniProt database were subjected to ProtParam, CELLO2GO, SOPMA (secondary structure prediction method), PDBsum (Protein Database summaries), PHYRE2 (Protein Homology/AnalogY Recognition Engine), SAVES v6.0 (Structure Validation Server), MEME version 5.4.1 (Multiple Em for Motif Elicitation), Caver Web server v 1.1, Interproscan and Predicted Antigenic Peptides tool. Analysis revealed the number of amino acids, isoelectric point, extinction coefficient, instability index and aliphatic index of GUS enzymes in the range of 586–795, 4.91–8.92, 89,980–155,075, 25.88–40.93 and 71.01–88.10, respectively. Sub-cellular localization of enzyme was restricted to cytoplasm and inner-membrane in case of breast cancer patients’ bacteria as compared to periplasmic space, outer membrane and extracellular space in normal GIT bacteria. The 2-D structure analysis showed α helix, extended strand, β turn and random coil in the range of 27.42–22.66%, 22.04–25.91%, 5.39–8.30% and 41.75–47.70%, respectively. The druggability score was found to be 0.05–0.45 and 0.06–0.80 in normal and breast cancer patients GIT, respectively. The radius, length and curvature of catalytic sites were observed to be 1.1–2.8 Å, 1.4–15.9 Å and 0.65–1.4, respectively. Ten conserved protein motifs with
p
< 0.05 and width 25–50 were found. Antigenic propensity-associated sequences were 20–29. Present study findings hint about the use of the bacterial GUS enzymes against breast cancer tumors after modifications via site-directed mutagenesis of catalytic sites involved in the activation of estrogens and through destabilization of these enzymes.