IN-SILICO ANALYSIS OF HEMATOPOEITIC STEM CELL ANTIGEN CD34 TO IDENTIFY ITS FUNCTIONAL IMPLICATIONS

Abstract

Stem cells nowadays, are a broad area of research. These have the capacity to divide and differentiate and form various organs on basis of their properties. Furthermore, they show clinical importance also in treating disorders like, SCID, COPD, and Emphysema which all have been described in this work. This requires association of some proteins which help in identification of the target sites and also have therapeutic value and are known as stem cell markers. Various types of stem cell markers and their roles have also been described in the thesis work. So, the work was to investigate the properties of these stem cell markers which help them in disease identification and treatment, particularly focusing attention on CD34 marker which has its role in homing as well as cell adhesion. Evaluation of its cell adhesion property was done by performing BLAST with similar molecules which are for their adhesion properties. The results proved the adhesion property of this molecule and to confirm this, another search was performed using CLUSTALW for multiple sequence alignment and to construct a phylogenetic tree to evaluate distance homology between them. It showed, close homology to N-CAM and PECAM-1 which are adhesion molecules. So, it was finally proved that CD34 is also an adhesion molecule which is a major finding in stem cell therapy used for lung regeneration.