How to find out change in function of a gene?

Question

[cv.napping]

How can I find out if a gene's function has been altered in an organism? What's the proper way to do it?

Details of what I've done: I blasted the prortein and used uniprot to look at its function and compared the functions to the first few highly similar organisms' functions? Is this the right way? This way I'm finding more than 3 functions that are novel in the organism of interest.

Somebody suggested me to to look at the mutated site from blast result and check for its annotation. Now I'm only a beginner in bioinfo and I'm not sure how to look for the annotation associated with that specific site.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

[Devon Ryan]

There's not going to be a fully automated method to do this. A common method is to search the literature and find papers that have measured whatever this protein does (phosphorylates something, pass ions, buffer calcium, etc.). You'd then need to compare those measurements across species, keeping in mind that the methods used are likely not really comparable. Of course that's likely to not yield much, so you may have to just do some in vitro experiments.

[cv.napping]

Can you please clarify more?