Title

Functional annotation of hypothetical proteins – A review

Authors

Selvarajan Sivashankari¹ and Piramanayagam Shanmughavel^2,*

Affiliation

¹Department of Bioinformatics, Kongunadu arts and science college, Coimbatore 29, India; ²Computational Biology Laboratory, Department of Bioinformatics, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore-641046, India

Email

shanvel_99@yahoo.com; * Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

received August 15, 2006; revised October 20, 2006; accepted November 1, 2006; published online December 29, 2006

Abstract

The complete human genome sequences in the public database provide ways to understand the blue print of life. As of June 29, 2006, 27 archaeal, 326 bacterial and 21 eukaryotes is complete genomes are available and the sequencing for 316 bacterial, 24 archaeal, 126 eukaryotic genomes are in progress. The traditional biochemical/molecular experiments can assign accurate functions for genes in these genomes. However, the process is time-consuming and costly. Despite several efforts, only 50-60 % of genes have been annotated in most completely sequenced genomes. Automated genome sequence analysis and annotation may provide ways to understand genomes. Thus, determination of protein function is one of the challenging problems of the post-genome era. This demands bioinformatics to predict functions of un-annotated protein sequences by developing efficient tools. Here, we discuss some of the recent and popular approaches developed in Bioinformatics to predict functions for hypothetical proteins.

Keywords

hypothetical; protein function; functional annotation; prediction; assignments

Citation

Edited by

R. Sowdhamini

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.