Many putative virulence functions have been identified, however no single function is crucial for the pathogenesis of S. suis.
Predicted proteins, including many with putative functions assigned, could be retrieved for 43,944 (82.4%) of the 53,339 dnOST transcript isoforms, which is a percentage similar or above previous studies involving plant species without sequenced genomes [ 10, 14].
Many of putative function assignments of proteins do not describe biochemical function or biological role.
Whilst many of the putative functions have been ascribed from human or mammalian research, both the receptor-transporting protein 2 and IFI56 have been identified in salmon and carp, respectively as interferon responsive genes induced in response to viral infections [ 38, 39].
Since many of these have only putative functions (~50%) or are without functional annotation (~28%) the functional network approach used in this study revealed interesting novel candidates that may play central roles in sporangia formation.
In Table 1, from among the 223 genes, we list 30 most strongly induced and repressed genes as well as their putative functions, many of which are discussed below.
While it is typically assumed that homologous proteases like caspases and metacaspases that share the same structural motifs also share the same functions, many putative proteases recently identified in sequenced genomes, have shown large variations in sequence and structures among homologous proteases and growing evidence indicates that structural variants have, in fact, different functions.
The extended annotation assigns putative functions to many genes with unknown functions.
Many of the sequences have putative functions that appear consistent with developmental activities of IFL1/REV in Arabidopsis.
The encoded proteins possessed a variety of defined and putative functions, with many postulated to possess latent enzymatic activity arising from catalytic promiscuity or substrate ambiguity.
