SoCCer: A pipeline to identify classes of soluble proteins in chemical communication in insect genomes

Abstract

Insects require olfactory cues to perform a number of processes. With an increasing number of insect genomes that are getting realized, there is a need for an automatic method to classify proteins involved in olfaction into various types so that their cognate odorant assignment becomes possible and to eliminate errors due to misclassification into protein families with related functions and/ biochemical or structural properties. We propose a near-automatic computational protocol to identify and classify protein sequences of a given genome into odorant binding protein subfamilies and other major soluble protein families involved in insect chemical communication. Such a protocol can be used to identify and classify odorant binding proteins (OBPs) in large genomes but could also be applied to large number of other globular proteins as well.