I have discovered a unique protein expressed in various tissues, yet its function remains unknown. To gain insight into its role, I seek your expertise in the latest techniques and verified methodologies in biological sciences. Please contribute your knowledge and perspectives to this thread on how to find a function of a gene.
First, I would recommend that you read some reviews, e.g.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26820/
And second, before doing any wet-lab experiments, I would suggest to conduct in silico function predictions, e.g. looking for homologous proteins, specific protein domains, prediction of the potential localization (cytoplasm vs nuclear), ...
A simple google search will help you to find a number of online tools
e.g.
https://deepgo.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/deepgo/
http://www.geneinfinity.org/sp/sp_proteinfunction.html
However, these are only basic tools and for an in-depth computational analysis you will need some bioinformatics skills.
sabine's answer is pretty good, before going on bench a little work on database is required. you can blast your sequence in NCBI (https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi) and see relevant results to go further.
all the best
fred
A good please to start is expressing N/C terminally GFP tagged copies and just seeing where it localizes to. You can then cross link it to interacting proteins, co-precipitate, digest and then sequence using mass spectroscopy. You then blast the resulting sequences to find the identity of interacting proteins which can be verified by yeast 2 hybrid systems. From the interaction partners you might be able to infer the biological role. The next step would be to use CRISPR to make a knockout model which you can then probe for gene expression, metabolic and structural changes.
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