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Antibiotics are crucial in pharmaceuticals that are used against a broad range of bacteria to reduce their growth in living organisms. Antibiotics have been known for the last 30 years approximately according to their function and classification as antibiotics have been around for a lot longer!!. In working, antibiotics act as part of immune system and target bacterial cells specifically. Similarly, on detection of certain immune signals within living cells, antibiotics detect harmful pathogens and act against them. Broad-spectrum antibiotics affect both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, causing serious illnesses in human beings. But gradually, with passage of time, such bacteria have become resistant to these antibiotics, resulting in prolonged bacterial infection and diseases. Resistance in bacteria is caused generally by means of self-medication, genetic variations, or mutations in bacteria and also by phenotypic variation such as β-lactams. As antibiotics are specific to their targets, bacteria secrete certain enzymes to cleave chemical bonds within antibiotic structure. Furthermore, alteration in membrane permeability, antibiotic target modifications in bacteria, and resistant gene transfer to next generations also cause resistance to antibiotics and, hence, bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Neisseria gonorrhea, etc. have become resistant and cause lethal diseases in human beings. To avoid such resistance, molecular methods are to be adopted such as RNA-mediated gene silencing, biosynthetic gene cluster (BSG) control mechanism, and most importantly, nanomedicines are key developments in this area.

Objective Human adenoviruses are small double stranded DNA viruses that provoke vast array of human diseases. Next generation sequencing techniques increase genomic data of HAdV rapidly, which increase their serotypes. The complete genome sequence of human adenovirus shows that it contains large amount of proteins with unknown cellular or biochemical function, known as hypothetical proteins. Hence, it is indispensable to functionally and structurally annotate these proteins to get better understanding of the novel drug targets. The purpose was the characterization of 38 randomly retrieved hypothetical proteins through determination of their physiochemical properties, subcellular localization, function, structure and ligand binding sites using various sequence and structure based bioinformatics tools. Results Function of six hypothetical proteins P03269, P03261, P03263, Q83127, Q1L4D7 and I6LEV1 were predicted confidently and then used further for structure analysis. We found that these proteins may act as DNA terminal protein, DNA polymerase, DNA binding protein, adenovirus E3 region protein CR1 and adenoviral protein L1. Functional and structural annotation leading to detection of binding sites by means of docking analysis can indicate potential target for therapeutics to defeat adenoviral infection. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13104-017-2992-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Additional file 1: Table S1. This table reports list of 38 hypothetical proteins of human adenovirus along with their UniProt ID, corresponding genome and protein length.