**8. Functional prediction tools**

In disease surveillance, understanding the effect of mutations detected in the viral genomes through the methods identified above is invaluable in the development of relevant controls and interventions [47]. Many of these mutations serve as drug targets as well as provide insights into the response mechanism of the pathogens to existing interventions. A global surveillance system would therefore be incomplete without the capability to provide insights to the function of discovered mutations. Below we explore some of the tools that have been applied to understand the functional relevance of mutations found in arboviruses.

### **8.1 The SIFT (sorting intolerant from tolerant)**

The SIFT algorithm predicts the effect of coding variants on protein function [54, 55]. Since its introduction in 2001, SIFT has become one of the standard tools for characterizing missense variation. It has a corresponding website that provides users with predictions on their variants.
