Bioinformatics: An Aid in Functional and Structural Annotation of Hypothetical Proteins

Advancements in different techniques have resulted in a set of predicted proteins, defined as hypothetical proteins whose existence in vivo is unknown. An incomplete understanding of protein sequence/structure/function relationships causes many difficulties for prediction methods. In this genomic era, accurate functional annotations of the proteins encoded by more than half a million genomes sequenced are essential for genomic analysis. Despite several efforts, only half of the genes have been annotated in most completely sequenced genomes. In these situations, three-dimensional structural predictions combined with a suite of computational tools can suggest possible functions for the hypothetical proteins. Hence, an innovative in silico approach with bioinformatics tools to annotate proteins has been a tedious task compared to in vitro techniques. Thus, these computational tools have been used to annotate hypothetical proteins, and their predictive and accurate results prove to be an appropriate approach for functional annotation. This study provides an in-depth understanding of the various computational tools and databases available for high-accuracy annotation of proteins.