Functional annotation of proteins
About the client
Biotalys is a Belgian agriculture biotechnology company with a focus on the development of innovative crop protection products. Their vision is to help produce safe, healthy food in a sustainable manner. To do this, they have developed a proprietary technology platform to boost the development of a number of biofungicides, bioinsecticides and biobactericides.
About the project
Functional annotation of proteins is the association of a protein with its biological and biochemical role as well as its cellular location in a cell. Once a set of proteins has been functionally annotated, representations of the biological knowledge) information may be used to assess whether certain protein functions are over or underrepresented in a set of proteins compared to another set. This process is called functional enrichment analysis.

Here, Biotalys sought to perform such a functional enrichment analysis of a protein set produced after a purification protocol that is being tested.
“BioLizard’s results allow us an in-depth view on the isolated protein fractions and provide support for the further development of our (purification) protocols.” – Biotalys
Our approach
• Assignment of functions to the unannotated protein sequences, this was performed using a series of prediction programs.
• Via the OmicsBox platform, integrated the GO annotations as well as assigned the protein description of the best blast hit to each predicted protein.
• Carried out a functional enrichment analysis with the list of proteins obtained before and after Biotalys’ purification protocol.
Results

Described the functional annotation of the proteome as well as the functional enrichment analysis of the list of protein IDs before and after their purification.

Obtained a mapping table with all the annotations.

Concluded that certain proteins are overrepresented after the purification protocol.