Abstract
Proteins are the essential biomolecules of life. They are the basic building blocks made of the same 20 amino acids. Understanding a protein’s structure plays a pivotal role in revealing its function in the genome of an organism. Studying the protein’s native conformation could pave the way to design novel drugs and help in bringing cure to some serious health ailments. Our current research work focuses on analyzing the structure of a plant protein called Maturase K of Annona muricata, a medicinally potent plant belonging to the family Annonaceae. This wonder plant and its plant extracts have taken center stage in the scientific and medical research due to its myriad medicinal properties present in its phytochemical compounds that help to cure or to control several types of infectious diseases including certain cancers, as in colon cancer. Recent advent of the Artificial Intelligence tools and its explosive foray into the field of Bioinformatics has revolutionized the field of structural biology, through its protein structure prediction tool called ‘AlphaFold’. This tool delivers highly accurate structure predictions of vast numbers of proteins, which otherwise would have been time consuming via experimental determination. The current study focuses on the use of one such AI based structure prediction tool called ‘AlphaFold’ to predict and elucidate the 3D structure of our query protein ‘Maturase K’ and analyze the protein's functional domains using the ‘ConSurf server’. Both the operations were performed solely based on its amino acids and the residue conservation in the secondary structural elements. The conserved and non-conserved amino acids during the course of evolution might further play a key role in establishing an evolutionary relationship and evolutionary divergence among its members and also helps to predict and understand the protein’s stability leaving a huge scope in finding the possible binding sites to design drugs to alleviate diseases including cancer and predict new protein functionalities