Functional Annotation of Selected Streptococcus pneumoniae Hypothetical Proteins

Abstract

The ability of Streptococcus pneumoniae to induce infection relies on its virulence factor machinery. A previous study has identified essential proteins that might be responsible towards the pathogenicity of S. pneumoniae serotype 2 strain D39. However, 39 of them were yet functionally and structurally uncharacterized. Thus, by using in silico approach, this study aims to annotate the function and the structure of these unannotated proteins. Initially, all 39 targeted proteins went through primary screening for template availability and pathogenicity. From there, 11 of them were selected and were further analyzed on the basis of their physicochemical, functional and structural categorization using an integrated bioinformatics approach by means of amino acid sequence and structure-based analysis. The obtained data suggested that all targeted proteins showed high possibility to be involved in either cell viability or cell pathogenicity mechanism of the bacterium, with SPD_1333 and SPD_1743 being the two most promising proteins to be further studied. Findings from this study could provide a better understanding of the pathogenic ability of this microorganism and thus, enhance drug development and target identification processes in the aim of improving pneumococcal disease control.