English

Abstract

Researches on archaeal microorganisms continue to excite the scientific community. Their unique adaptations that cater to hypersaline, hyperthermic, and hypothermic circumstances have incited research to manipulate those attributes for use in virtually every aspect of life. Adaptations in membrane, enzymes, and protein structures and components have potential applications in areas including electronics, agriculture, aquaculture, medicine, pharmaceuticals, food science, and nutrition. Although the time and effort required to new find archaeal homologues may be great, many believe that the economic and environmental benefits of such a breakthrough would be considerable enough to outweigh the challenges. An analysis of the archeal genome Aeropyrum pernix, showed that certain regions earlier thought to be ‘non-coding’ have significant sequence similarity to other protein sequences from archaea and other species. The available sequence analysis tools were used to identify a number of potential protein coding regions in these putative ‘non coding’ regions. We could identify 907 such regions and 282 of them apparently code for proteins present in archeal or other species. The remaining 625 regions are mostly start /stop conflicts. Of the 282 protein coding regions, only 64 code for proteins with homologues of known function. A good number of proteins show homology to proteins that are important for the survival of the organism. Hence these novel regions may be referred as homologues to coding regions. In addition Genome sequence collections should be regularly checked to improve gene prediction by sequence similarity and greater effort is required to make gene definitions consistent across related species.