Assignment of putative functions to membrane ?hypothetical proteins? from Trypanosomatids? genomes

SILBER, ARIEL; PEREIRA, CA

JOURNAL OF MEMBRANE BIOLOGY

SPRINGER

Año: 2012 vol. 245 p. 125 - 129

0022-2631

Protozoan parasites cause thousands of deaths each year in developing countries. The genome projects of these parasites opened a new era in the identification of therapeutic targets. However, the putative function could be predicted only for less than a half of the protein-coding genes. In this work, all Trypanosoma cruzi proteins containing predicted transmembrane spans were processed through an automated computational routine and further analyzed in order to assign the most probable function. The analysis consisted in dissecting the whole predicted protein in different regions. More than 5,000 sequences were processed, and the predicted biological functions have been grouped in 19 categories according to the hits obtained after analysis.One focus of interest of the present work, due to the scarce information available in trypanosomatids, are proteins involved in signal transduction processes. In the present work, we identified 54 proteins belonging to this group, which were individually analyzed. The obtained results show that by means of a simple pipeline it was possible to attribute probable functions to sequences annotated as coding for ?hypothetical proteins?. Besides, we could successfully identify the major quantity of candidates to participate in the signal transduction pathways in T. cruzi.