Protein Classification Tool: uma ferramenta para anotação de proteínas utilizando bases secundárias

Abstract

Despite the great advances in genetic sequencing technology digitization of genetic material observed recently, which resulted in an exponential growth of the amount of data in sequence databases, the ability to properly analyze these sequences could not match this growth. As sequences that lack functional annotation (identification) or with incorrect annotation are of limited use to researchers, this work targets this problem by creating a tool, 'Protein Classification Tool' (PCT), that by the integration of several annotation functionalities eases the process of sequence annotation at the same time that allows the obtention of more accurate results. The PCT implements the following functionalities: BLAST sequence comparison against several secondary databases (GOA, COG/KOG and CGAP databases), domain analysis and phylogenetic analysis. Moreover, this work defines a framework so that other secondary databases and annotation functionalities may be added to the tool, in order to keep it up-to-date with new annotation techniques.