Prediction of the secretome of Microbotryum intermedium, as well as candidate fungal effectors

Secreted proteins are known to be an important virulence factor in the successful invasion and colonization of the host by fungi, especially for biotrophic parasites/pathogens of plants. To predict protein secretion, a genome must be evaluated by software that interrogates the genome for conserved sequences characteristic of known secreted proteins.

This work sought to identify putative secreted proteins of Microbotryum intermedium, a smut fungus found on plants of the Scabiosa family. To accomplish this, we used a pipeline of computational tools to serve as an efficient means of identifying potential targets as fungal effectors that can later be evaluated experimentally. So, this initial identification is ideally the first step in a larger investigation of the role of protein secretion in the development and progression of disease.

A pipeline of computational tools was used to stringently predict secreted proteins for Microbotryum intermedium, The pipeline was used to predict the canonical secretome of this fungus. The annotated M. intermedium genome ( mycocosm.jgi.doe.gov/Micin1/Micin1.home.html ) has 8,148 predicted genes, of which, only 296 were classified as putative secreted proteins using the stringent pipeline for canonical secretion prediction. These data inform future functional analyses that test candidates for their roles in pathogenicity.