Study of Hypothetical Proteins in Shigella Phages

The Shigella phages are the bacterial viruses infecting various Shigella species. Their role in conversion of non-pathogenic Shigella strains to pathogenic are well studied, hence there is a need to understand the genetic makeup imparting such characteristics to their host. The present paper is an attempt to understand some of the known Shigella phages by studing their hypothetical proteins. The complete genome sequence of 3 Shigella phages viz, Shigella phage Sf6, Shigella phage phiSboM-AG1and Shigella phage SP16 revealed the presence of various hypothetical proteins. The probable function prediction of the 275 hypothetical proteins amongs the three phages was done by using Bioinformatics web tools like CDD-BLAST, INTERPROSCAN, PFAM, COGs and CATH. However, structure prediction for only 21 hypothetical proteins was possible by using PS2 protein modeling server. This study revealed the presences of functional domain in hypothetical proteins of Shigella phages; their roles are yet to be discovered. These interpreted data for hypothetical proteins can be used for the understanding of functional, structural, evolutionary and metabolic development of Shigella phages and its life cycle along with their role in host evolution.