Exploring Computational Protein Fishing (CPF) to Identify Argonaute Proteins from Sequenced Crop Genomes

Plant RNA interference has been a very well studied phenomenon since its discovery. We are well versed with the types of small noncoding RNAs that are prevalent in the plant systems and their pathways of biogenesis and subsequent actions. However, apart from model plant systems such as Arabidopsis and Oryza, very little information is available regarding the other members of the RNA interference machinery; specially Argonaute proteins which acts as the major stabilizing factor for execution of the interference. This work focuses on the exploration of the sequenced crop genomes available on the web using a hybrid approach of computational protein fishing and genome mining. The results indicate that this hybrid approach was successful in the identification of argonaute proteins in the crop genomes under study.