An In silico approach to identify potential inhibitors against multiple drug targets of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Background: The increasing incidence of multidrug-resistant cases of tuberculosis (TB) and difficulty in treating these cases requires an urgent need to find an effective anti-TB drug. There are many phytochemicals with reported antibacterial and antitubercular activities. Instead of targeting only a single target of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB), this study aims to identify phytochemicals targeting multiple drug targets of MTB through subtractive genomic/proteomic approach followed by in silico screening of phytochemicals with reported anti-TB activity. Methods: Of 614 essential genes of MTB reported in database of essential genes, 15 gene products were selected using different bioinformatic resources and tools such as PANTHER, Venny, NCBI, and BLAST. Results: Virtual screening analysis of these selected drug targets against identified 148 phytochemicals revealed that amentoflavone, carpaine, 13'bromo-tiliacorinine, and 2'nortiliacorinine, able to inhibit more than one target of MTB. Conclusion: These selected compounds may be proposed as potential inhibitors of MTB and need to be tested in TB culture studies in vitro to assess their anti-TB activity.