CONCLUSIONS The aim of this project was to find and identify selenoproteins, cysteine-homologues and machinery proteins in the genome of Neophocaena asiaeorientalis. Results were obtained by comparing the genome of our organism with the Homo sapiens proteins, extracted from the SelenoDB database. In our analysis, we could predict in Neophocaena asiaeorientalis genome a total of 25 selenoproteins, 8 cysteine-homologues and 8 machinery proteins, from which 2 were also selenoproteins. The selenoproteins found in the genome of Neophocaena asiaeorientalis are: GPx1, GPx2, GPx3, GPx4, GPx5, GPx6, DI1, DI2, DI3, Sel15, SelM, SelH, SelI, SelK, SelN, SelO, SelP, SelR1, SelS, SelT, SelW1, SelW2, TR1, TR2 and TR3. We also found the following cysteine-containing homologues: GPx7, GPx8, SelR2, SelR3, MsrA, SelU1, SelU2, SelU3. Regarding the machinery proteins, we found the following peptides in Neophocaena asiaeorientalis genome: PSTK, SECp43, SecS, eEFSec, SEPSH1, SBP2, SPS1 and SPS2. Among these, only SEPSH1 and SPS2 are selenoproteins. The only protein that was found in the human genome and was not in Neophocaena asiaeorientalis is SelV. As we have mentioned before, we came with the conclusion that our specie does not have this protein in its genome. The results obtained with this study suggest that there is good homology between N. asiaeorientalis genome and Homo sapiens, since we found the same selenoproteins in both species. This results match our expectations, since they are relatively close. During the analysis we came across some limitations. The first one is that some of the proteins predicted do not start with a methionine, and because of that we were unable to obtain a high-quality prediction. This may be due to the fact that the Neophocaena asiaeorientalis genome might not be perfectly annotated and it was fractionated in several scaffolds. Another possible explanation could be that the protein predicted was not complete, due to the quality of the alignment was high but it started with several gaps and the methionine was lacking. Another issue was the programme automatization, which started from the fastafech step and not from the beginning. We did that because we wanted to decide manually which scaffold we wanted to analyse from the tblastn output, but it would have been more efficient if we would have automated all the steps from the beginning. Finally, results interpretation has also been a limitation. We had to decide the exclusion criteria for choosing the best hits according to what we thought it was correct. Especially, we considered the e-value and the length of the hit. Overall, in this project we have identified and annotated the selenoproteins, cysteine-homologues and machinery proteins of N. asiaeorientalis by bioinformatic methods. This information can be useful for further studies about selenoproteins in cetaceans, as the genome of N. asiaeorientalis is still not well annotated. We suggest that molecular studies must be performed to confirm our results.