Targeted Metabolic Engineering Guided by Computational Analysis of Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs)

The non-synonymous SNPs, the so-called non-silent SNPs, which are single-nucleotide variations in the coding regions that give “birth” to amino acid mutations, are often involved in the modulation of protein function. Understanding the effect of individual amino acid mutations on a protein/enzyme function or stability is useful for altering its properties for a wide variety of engineering studies. Since measuring the effects of amino acid mutations experimentally is a laborious process, a variety of computational methods have been discussed here that aid to extract direct genotype to phenotype information.