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Biological nitrogen fixation is an important biogeochemical process that plays a major role in conversion of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia. All nitrogen fixing microbes depend upon the nitrogenase enzyme for nitrogen reduction, which is infact an enzyme complex consists of two metallo proteins: iron-molybdenum (FeMo) and iron (Fe) proteins. The main structural genes for nitrogenase enzyme are nifH, nifD and nifK. The nifH is the structural gene for Fe protein, whereas nifD and nifK are the respective structural genes for α and β sub units of FeMo protein. In addition to these three coding genes, co-occurence of three more genes viz., nifE, nifN and nifB are assumed to be essential for a functional nitrogenase enzyme in characterized systems (diaztrophs). The nifPred is the first computational tool for computational identification of nif proteins viz., nifH, nifD, nifK, nifE, nifN and nifB.
Biochemistry of nitrogen fixation
Please Cite:
Meher, P. K., Sahu, T. K., Mohanty, J., Gahoi, S., Purru, S., Grover, M. and Rao, A. R. (2018). nifPred: Proteome-wide identification and categorization of nitrogen-fixation proteins of diaztrophs based on composition-transition-distribution features using support vector machine. Frontiers in Microbiology, 9, 1100