Prioritizing orphan proteins for further study using phylogenomics and gene expression profiles in <it>Streptomyces coelicolor</it>

• Main Authors: Takano Eriko, Alam Mohammad, Breitling Rainer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BMC 2011-09-01
• Series: BMC Research Notes
• Online Access: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/4/325

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Streptomyces coelicolor</it>, a model organism of antibiotic producing bacteria, has one of the largest genomes of the bacterial kingdom, including 7825 predicted protein coding genes. A large number of these genes, nearly 34%, are functionally orphan (hypothetical proteins with unknown function). However, in gene expression time course data, many of these functionally orphan genes show interesting expression patterns.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this paper, we analyzed all functionally orphan genes of <it>Streptomyces coelicolor </it>and identified a list of "high priority" orphans by combining gene expression analysis and additional phylogenetic information (i.e. the level of evolutionary conservation of each protein).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The prioritized orphan genes are promising candidates to be examined experimentally in the lab for further characterization of their function.</p>