Functional Elucidation and Structure Prediction of Certain Hypothetical Proteins in Candida glabrata CBS 138: an In silico Approach

Abstract

Transition from an opportunistic pathogen to a deadly disease forming one, depends on a number of aspects, which activate causative protein production and their functions. In recent world, most of the proteins are still functionally unknown i.e. hypothetical proteins (HPs) and are not negligible. In the present study, functional categorization and structure prediction of 20 HPs of Candida glabrata was performed. Their physicochemical properties, functional domains, as well as interacted proteins were predicted and analyzed. Signal peptide, subcellular localizers, transmembrane regions were determined to explore physical characteristics of selected HPs. They were involved in various important functions such as nuclear-vacuolar junction, metabolic pathways, ATPase execution, DNA binding, mitochondrial transportation, amino acid biosynthesis and catabolism, vesicular transportation, extracellular, DNA repair and cell cycle control, nuclear functions, mitochondrial RNA synthesis and translation, RNA synthesis, glucose transportation and Ca2+ ion exchanger. 3D structure of each HP was determined and energy minimization was done by using GROMOS96 force field implicated in Swiss-Pdb Viewer. Ligand binding sites of the HPs showed the active regions, involved in functional modulation. Thus in silico analysis of HPs is more easy to reveal the structures and functions, which was experimentally very expensive and tedious. It would also be helpful in recognizing the mechanism of pathogenesis and in developing therapeutic drug molecules and their docking studies.