Title

Function annotation of peptides generated from the non-coding regions of D. melanogaster genome

Authors

Deepthi Varughese1*, Vineetha V. I. Nair3, Vipin Thomas1, Navya Raj1, Shidhi P. Ramakrishnan1, Juveria Khan2, Monika Kaushik2, Pawan K. Dhar 1, 2, Achuthsankar S. Nair1

Affiliation

1Department of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Kerala, Kariyavattom, Trivandrum; 2School of Biotechnology,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067, India, 3Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala,
Technopark, Trivandrum;

Email

Deepthi Varughese – E-mail: deepthidcb@keralauniversity.ac.in; Tel: 0471-3216730; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received April 20, 2016; Revised May 25, 2016; Accepted May 25, 2016; Published June 15, 2016

De novo emergence of genes is the most fundamental form of genetic diversity that is attracting the attention of the scientific community. Identification of short open reading frames (sORFs) from the non-coding regions of different genomes has been leading this thought recently. The coding potential of these newly identified sORFs have been investigated through experimental and
computational approaches in recent studies. In the present work we have tried to make peptides from intergenic sequences of D. melanogaster genome leading to therapeutic applications. Towards this goal of making novel peptides from non-coding genome, we have found strong computational evidence of 145 peptides with conformational stability from the intergenic sequences of D.
melanogaster. The structure of these completely unique peptides was predicted using ab initio method. The function annotation of these peptides was carried out using this structural information. The newly generated proteins were categorised as DNA/Protein/ion binding proteins, electron transporters and a very few as enzymes too. Experimental studies can certainly provide validations to these preliminary findings. This work provides further evidence of untapped potential of non-coding genome.

Keywords

Non-coding; junk DNA; de novo peptides; short ORFs; antimicrobial peptides

Citation

Varughese et al. Bioinformation 12(3): 202-208 (2016)

Edited by

P Kangueane

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.