Study of Prophages from Lactobacillus Species

The Lactobacillus prophages represent the phage-host association within the living bacterial cell. The prophage attributes various characters to its host and helps it for retaining suitable characteristics for adaptation as well as evolution. The study aims at understanding the role of prophage in influencing host functional characteristics by horizontal gene transfer. The of Lactobacillus prophages has revealed many hypothetical proteins. Our study predicted 66 functional hypothetical proteins in 3 Lactobacillus prophage genomes whereas; tertiary structures were predicted for 16 sequences using PS2 server. The probable enzymatic function prediction was done by using Bioinformatics web tools like CDD-BLAST, INTERPROSCAN, PFAM and COGs by searching sequence databases for the presence of orthologous enzymatic conserved domains in the hypothetical sequences. This study revealed many uncharacterized proteins, whose roles are yet to discover in Lactobacillus prophages. These deciphered data for hypothetical proteins can be used in linking regulatory and metabolic pathways of Lactobacillus sp as well as their relationship with Lactobacillus phages.