Gene listed as "uncharacterized" even if I found it through another search term

Question

[100dustedclays]

I was looking if a certain species had a particular gene,

1)so I went to NCBI and searched typed the "lipase" into the search bar.

2) filtered by taxon.

3) my species of interest was listed in the taxon, so i clicked it

4) results show a entrez id but the description is "uncharacterized LOC..."

Does this mean that the gene sequence is similar to other sequences of lipase, but we just are not 100% sure that "characterized LOC" is a lipase in my target species?

[GenoMax]

About LOC gene designation (From LINK):

Symbols beginning with LOC. When a published symbol is not available, and orthologs have not yet been determined, Gene will provide a symbol that is constructed as 'LOC' + the GeneID. This is not retained when a replacement symbol has been identified, although queries by the LOC term are still supported. In other words, a record with the symbol LOC12345 is equivalent to GeneID = 12345. So if the symbol changes, the record can still be retrieved on the web using LOC12345 as a query, or from any file using GeneID = 12345.

Answer 1

[Mensur Dlakic]

Why wouldn't they just change the description to "lipase"?

Many proteins are uncharacterized at the time of their entry into database, and those annotations may never be amended. This may be an important protein to you, but there are 400+ million proteins in the database. Of those, I'd say that conservatively 1/3 to 1/4 are annotated as uncharacterized.

By the way, lipase is a fairly generic annotation. Most lipases are alpha/beta hydrolases, or catalytic triad hydrolases, and there are hundreds of different lipids they modify, and likely tens of thousands of other substrates. Assuming that this is "your protein" just because it is some kind of lipase is probably not the safest bet, as it is very likely that there are many other lipases in your organism of interest. The way to find them is by sequence similarity, not by searching for a phrase such as lipase.

[100dustedclays]

thank you. When I blast the "unchracterized LOC##" across other arthropods genomes, nothing comes up except for a match with itself.

So this gene may have been inaccurately tagged as a lipase even though it is not?

[Mensur Dlakic]

I may not be able to answer your question at all, but for sure can't answer it with the information you provided.