2.11 | Known and potential drug targets
All compound-related proteins were searched against target proteins from ChEMBL v26 (Anna et al., 2012) using BLASTP (E≤1×10−10). We screened out all types of single proteins in the ChEMBL database for blasting. Known drug targets were identified from available publications and by searching for ‘anthelmintics’ in the DrugBank (Wishart, Feunang, An, Lo, & Wilson, 2017) database. For potential drug targets, we screened out all the single protein targets as described (Avril Coghlan, Mutowo, O’Boyle, Lomax, & Berriman, 2018) and made adjustments to evaluate each gene. We set a score of ‘0/1’ considering six main factors: 1. Similarity with ChEMBL drug targets and a highly conserved alignment (>80%); 2. Lack of human homologues; 3. Related to lethal, L3 arrest, flaccid, molt defect and sterile phenotypes. Lethal phenotypes were identified in WormBase WS240; 4. Whether the protein was a predicted chokepoint enzyme (Tyagi, Seshadri, Parkinson, & Mitreva, 2018); 5. Whether the protein was predicted as an excretory/secretory protein (EP); and 6. Whether the protein had a structure in the PDBe (Sameer et al., 2016). In order to make the screening most efficient, we searched for commercially available compounds against the target protein in ZINC15 (Sterling & Irwin, 2015). Finally, we selected compounds approved in phase III or above as suggested chemical compounds.