Network Analysis of Beta Casomorphin-7 Revealed Genes and Pathways Associated with Human Diseases

Context: Several epidemiological researches imply a link between exposure to A1 beta casein (BC) containing milk and the incidence of non-communicable diseases in humans.Many breeding policies support BC variants not releasing Beta Casomorphin-7 (BCM-7).Objective: Insilico network analysis was performed to determine the bioactive targets, pathways and diseases associated with A1 and A2 beta casein and BCM-7. Results:The analysis revealed 63 bioactive targets for A1 and A2 beta casein with 118 pathways and 30 diseases associated.There were no differences in bioactive targets between A1 and A2 beta casein.For BCM-7, 15 bioactive targets were identified, which were found to be associated with 18 pathways and 4 diseases. Conclusion:The results showed that the change in amino acid at the 67th position in A1 and A2 beta casein did not affect the bioactive targets.BCM-7 may be held responsible for adverse effects until challenged by clinical trials. Material and MethodsA1 and A2 variants of Beta Casein protein sequence were downloaded from NCBI Accession number: AAA30431.1 and UTO68600.1 respectively.Signal peptides are removed from both the sequences before subjecting them to downstream analysis.The physicochemical properties of the proteins were assessed using the ProtParam tool of ExPASy database (https://web.expasy.org/protparam/).Sequence alignment was done using Emboss (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/psa/emboss_water/) to ensure change of amino acid at 67 th position in between the two casein variants.Canonical SMILES of the two proteins were generated using ChemAxon webtool (https://datascience.unm.edu/tomcat/biocomp/convert).SMILE file of BCM-7 was downloaded from