Introduction to Mtb Station
From DrugPedia: A Wikipedia for Drug discovery
[edit] Structural Annotation of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis
There is continues advancement in sequencing technologies in last decade, which resulted in exponential growth in sequence databases. The first level of challenges is to predict/assign co-ordinate of protein coding regions (genes) and repeats in nucleotide sequences. Second level of challenge is to predict function of these gene products or proteins. Between the two levels of challenges, first level is comparatively easy. The databases are flooded with tens of thousands of protein sequences of unknown function due to complexity involved in function assignment. The gap between protein of known sequence and known function is increasing with exponential rates over the years due to advancement in sequence technology and complextity involved in function assignment.
Protein function itself is a very complex phenomenon that is associated with many mutually overlapping levels: biochemical, cellular, organism-mediated, developmental and physiological, all intertwined intricately. There are several definitions of protein function ranging from a very general “a capability that a gene product carries as a potential” to more complex and restrictive definitions based on knowledge representation. There are several methods to represent protein function which include: free text descriptions such as those contained in SWISS-PROT database; assignment of terms from a hierarchically arranged controlled vocabulary like Gene Ontology term (http://www.geneontology.org); description in terms of its interaction with, or relations to other molecules (protein-protein, protein-DNA, protein-RNA). Each level of experimental protein function determination is a laborious task that can take enormous resources. Hence automatic elucidation of protein function emerges as a major research area of Bioinformatics. A protein may have various type of functions, thus it is not practically possible to predict all type of functions of a protein. Thus functional annotation of a genome from holistic point of view is not practically possible. Thus there is need to use “divide and conquer” approach for functional annotation. In simple term we need to handle each type of function at a time, which can be integrated at later stage.
Structural annotation of proteins may provide useful information as function of a protein is decided by the three dimensional structure of proteins. Thus prediction of tertiary structure of protein is important to understand the function of a protein. The experimental techniques of protein structure determination have their own limitations and unable to fill the gap between known sequences and known structure. In order to overcome this limitation attempt have been made to predict protein structure from its amino acid sequence using bioinformatics approach. Since protein structure is more conserved than sequence, some methods use structural information to predict function. Attempt has also been made in past to predict function of proteins from predicted structure of proteins. In this project we are proposing structural annotation of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (MTb). In simple term we will provide structural information about proteins including interaction and docking information.
