Bioinformatics mining of the dark matter proteome for cancer targets discovery

Mining the human genome for therapeutic target(s) discovery promises novel outcome. Over half of the proteins in the human genome however, remain uncharacterized. These proteins offer a potential for new target(s) discovery for diverse diseases. Additional targets for cancer diagnosis and therapy are urgently needed to help move away from the cytotoxic era to a targeted therapy approach. Bioinformatics and proteomics approaches can be used to characterize novel sequences in the genome database to infer putative function. The hypothesis that the amino acid motifs and proteins domains of the uncharacterized proteins can be used as a starting point to predict putative function of these proteins provided the framework for the research discussed in this dissertation.