Original Articles
Sanni David, Fatoki Toluwase a
Abstract
Ebola virus is an aggressive pathogen that causes a highly lethal hemorrhagic fever syndrome in humans and nonhuman primates. The Ebola virus (EBOV) genome is 19 kb long; with seven open reading frames encoding structural proteins and nonstructural proteins, and its glycoprotein (GP) is responsible for binding and viral entry. Garcinia kola which is commonly called bitter kola has been implicated with antiparasitic, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic, anti-oxidant, and antihepatoxic activities. In this study, selected bioactive components of Garcinia kola were computationally evaluated for therapeutic potential in relevance to Ebola virus disease (EVD) using standard bioinformatics tools such as Blastp, Hmmer, ClustalO, Swisstargetprediction and Swissadme. The result showed that EBOV-GP is a distant homolog of three human endogenous retrovirus proteins (HERV), and the probable targets of G. kola include cannabinoid receptor 1 and 2, matrix metalloproteinases (e.g. Collagenase-3) and cyclin dependent kinases, of which they have been implicated in human pathology such as viral infections and cancer.