Bioinformatics analysis identify novel OB fold protein coding genes in C. elegans

摘要

The C. elegans genome has been extensively annotated by the wormbase consortium that uses state of the art bioinformatics pipelines, functional genomics and manual curation approaches, as a result the identification of novel genes in silico in this model organism is becoming more challenging and require novel approaches. The oligonucleotide-oligosaccharide binding fold is a highly divergent fold where proteins sequences of the family in spite of having the same fold share very little sequence identities (5-25%). Therefore, sequence based annotation evidences may not be sufficient to identify all the members of this highly divergent family. In C. elegans the number of OB fold proteins reported is remarkably low (n=46) compared to other evolutionary related eukaryotes such as yeast S. Cerevisiae (n=344) or fruit fly D. melanogaster (n=84). Genomics rearrangements during evolution may have occurred or differences in the level of annotation for this protein family may explain these discrepancies.