Structural and Functional Biology Approaches of Leptospirosis Kidney Disease

Proteins are the basic elements used by living organisms to perform the biological functions, and protein structure can reveal the detailed working mechanisms of the biological reactions. In Leptospira, approximately 49 protein structures in different forms and conformations have been solved and deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). In this chapter, we will discuss the structural and functional relationship of the proteins from Leptospira and methods for protein structure determination. Knowing the protein structure could help improve our understanding of the relationship between leptospirosis and kidney disease. Several methods are applied to determine the protein structure including X-ray crystallography, small-angle X-rays scattering, nuclear magnetic resonance, and electron microscopy (EM). The advantages and applications of these technologies will further be discussed in the following sections. PDB contains 49 solved Leptospira structures, consisting of 41 structures from L. interrogans, 6 structures from L. biflexa, 1 structure from L. licerasiae, and 1 structure from L. santarosai. The functional classification of these Leptospira proteins found that there were 6 transporters, 7 adhesins, 26 enzymes, 2 regulators, and 5 structural proteins. The structure information of the Leptospira proteins provides detailed mechanisms for the pathogenesis in leptospirosis-induced kidney disease.