THEMATICS as a Tool for Functional Genomics

Structural genomics efforts are determining in high throughput the three-dimensional structures of thousands of gene products. Many of these protein structures are of unknown function. The next major step after genome sequencing and protein structure determination is the determination of the function of the thousands of newly-discovered gene products. This presentation focuses on THEMATICS [3, 4], a simple computational predictor of information about the function of a protein. In particular, THEMATICS predicts the location of, and some chemical characteristics of, the active site of an enzyme. Application of THEMATICS requires only the structure of the subject protein. Thus THEMATICS works for proteins that have no similarity in sequence or in structure to any protein of known function. The accuracy of THEMATICS predictions is verified using proteins whose functions and mechanisms have been well studied experimentally.