Characterization of Lovastatin biosynthetic cluster proteins in Aspergillus terreus strain ATCC 20542

Aspergillus terreus is a filamentous ascomycota, which is prominent for its production of lovastatin, an antihypercholesterolemic drug. The commercial importance of lovastatin with annual sales of billions of dollars made us to focus on lovastatin biosynthetic cluster proteins. The analysis of these lovastatin biosynthetic cluster proteins with different perspectives such as physicochemical property, structure based analysis and functional studies were done to find out the role and function of every protein involved in the lovastatin biosynthesis pathway. Several computational tools are used to predict the physicochemical properties, secondary structural features, topology, patterns, domains and cellular location. There are 8 unidentified proteins in lovastatin biosynthetic cluster, in which 6 proteins have homologous partners, and annotation transfer is done based on the closely related homologous genes, and their structures are also modeled. The two other proteins that do not have homologous partners are predicted as PQ loop repeat protein that may be involved in glycosylation machinery and as thiolase-acyl activity by the integrated functional analysis approach.