Abstract
Prochlorococcus marinus MIT 9303 is a marine cyanobacterium found in sea waters. It was first isolated from a depth of 100 m in the Sargasso Sea in the year 1992. This cyanobacterium serves as a good model system for scientific research due to the presence of many desirable characteristics like smaller in size, ability to perform photosynthesis and the ease of culture maintenance. The genome of this cyanobacterium encodes for about 3022 proteins. Out of these 3022 proteins, few proteins were annotated as hypothetical proteins. We performed a computational study to characterize one of the hypothetical proteins “P9303_05031” to deduce its functional role in the cell using various bioinformatics techniques. After in-depth analysis, this hypothetical protein showed the conserved domain as of Hsp10 of molecular chaperonins of GroES. In this work, we have predicted the bidirectional best hits for the hypothetical protein P9303_05031 followed by the prediction of protein properties such as primary, secondary and tertiary structures. The existence of the Hsp10 domain indicates its role is essential for the folding of proteins during heat shock. This work represents the first structural and physicochemical study of the hypothetical protein P9303_05031 in Prochlorococcus marinus MIT 9303.
Highlights
Cyanobacteria are the ancient group of oxygenic photosynthetic micro-organisms existing on earth since 2.7 billion years ago [1]
We have selected a hypothetical protein of a cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus marinus MIT 9303
The strain of the current study Prochlorococcus marinus MIT 9303 was isolated from a depth of 100 m at the Sargasso Sea in 1992
Summary
Cyanobacteria are the ancient group of oxygenic photosynthetic micro-organisms existing on earth since 2.7 billion years ago [1]. Till today there are several genomes of cyanobacteria sequenced and made publicly available at NCBI (ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes) Using these completely sequenced genomes and by applying bioinformatics techniques one can find answers for many questions related to evolution, adaptation, physiology, and biochemistry of cyanobacteria [5]. As this cyanobacterium possesses many hypothetical proteins, characterization of these hypothetical proteins is an important task. There are many opinions about the experimental studies that sometimes they end up with no results (such as expressing the protein in inclusion bodies, etc.) To counteract these problems, the use of computational methods has gained importance. We have selected a hypothetical protein of a cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus marinus MIT 9303
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