Structural and functional annotation of uncharacterized protein in Bacillus anthracis A2012

Abstract

An extensive interpretation of Bacillus anthracis A2012 proteomics data showed that it contains hypothetical proteins (HPs), i.e. proteins of unknown function. Bacillus anthracis A2012 causes Anthrax which is of great concern due to its outbreaks across globe that may lead to death and used as bioterrorism agent. Computational analysis of 'Hypothetical' proteins provides general prediction of structure and function of an organism to a more profound understanding of their machinery. The bacterium consists of 2 plasmids, pX01 and pX02. In our current work, the sequence of 129 HPs from pX01 plasmid and 59 HPs from pX02 plasmid were collected from NCBI database. Several bioinformatics tool for identification of: motif and domain search, transmembrane analysis, membrane protein topology, sequence similarity, protein solubility, physical and chemical parameters, protein localization, fold recognition and Ramachandran plot analysis were run to annotate HPs. It is conferred that these HPs belong to various classes of proteins such as enzymes, transporters, receptors, signal transducers and other proteins. From these HPs, 4 hypothetical proteins from both plasmids (pX01 and pX02) are identified with proper structure and function. Among these 4 proteins, ONE protein is best annotated with having confidence score 99%. This research aims to produce a better understanding of mechanism of drug discovery for treatment of Bacillus anthracis infections.