Computational Approaches for Protein Function Prediction: A Survey

Abstract

Proteins are the most essential and versatile macromolecules of life, and the knowledge of their functions is a crucial link in the development of new drugs, better crops, and even the development of synthetic biochemicals such as biofuels. Experimental procedures for protein function prediction are inherently low throughput and are thus unable to annotate a non-trivial fraction of proteins that are becoming available due to rapid advances in genome sequencing technology. This has motivated the development of computational techniques that utilize a variety of high-throughput experimental data for protein function prediction, such as protein and genome sequences, gene expression data, protein interaction networks and phylogenetic profiles. Indeed, in a short period of a decade, several hundred articles have been published on this topic. This survey aims to discuss this wide spectrum of approaches by categorizing them in terms of the data type they use for predicting function, and thus identify the trends and needs of this very important field. The survey is expected to be useful for computational biologists and bioinformaticians aiming to get an overview of the field of computational function prediction, and identify areas that can benefit from further research.