Jalview on show at the Neglected Tropical Diseases festival

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Composite image of two photos of a Jalview Jigsaw

Delegates attending the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases festival in London on Tuesday 27th March got the opportunity to complete a Jalview jigsaw.

As well as speaking about Sci*Art and public outreach projects that she has been involved in, Suzanne (Duce) brought a mini exhibit to the festival. It was made up of artwork and outreach materials relating to malaria and kinetoplastid diseases.

The picture on the jigsaw is of the compound DDD107498 discovered at the Drug Discovery Unit in the School of Life Sciences. This is a potential anti-malarial drug with a novel mode of action. DDD107498 targets the translation elongation factor 2 (eEF2) protein in the malaria parasite, thus disrupting its ability to produce proteins. The compound is currently being taken into clinical trials by Merck Serono.

A multiple sequence alignment of eEF2 sequences from human, yeast and Plasmodium falciparum was generated using Jalview. The result was included in the extended data figure 7 in the Nature paper 522:315-20 (2015).