Abstract
Pathogens are able to deliver small-secreted, cysteine-rich proteins into plant cells to enable infection. The computational prediction of effector proteins remains one of the most challenging areas in the study of plant fungi interactions. At present, there are several bioinformatic programs that can help in the identification of these proteins; however, in most cases, these programs are managed independently. Here, we present EffHunter, an easy and fast bioinformatics tool for the identification of effectors. This predictor was used to identify putative effectors in 88 proteomes using characteristics such as size, cysteine residue content, secretion signal and transmembrane domains.
Highlights
IntroductionFungal phytopathogens are a major threat to food security since they can cause devastating losses to important crops in agriculture
Fungal phytopathogens are a major threat to food security since they can cause devastating losses to important crops in agriculture.These pathogenic fungi secrete diverse small proteins in the infection process which are pathogenicity or virulence determinants that manipulate the interaction, and are commonly referred to as “effectors” [1,2,3,4]
The architecture of EffHunter consists of four modules: (1) analysis of the protein length and cysteine count, (2) detection of signal peptide, (3) transmembrane domains and (4) subcellular localization
Summary
Fungal phytopathogens are a major threat to food security since they can cause devastating losses to important crops in agriculture These pathogenic fungi secrete diverse small proteins in the infection process which are pathogenicity or virulence determinants that manipulate the interaction, and are commonly referred to as “effectors” [1,2,3,4]. Most fungal effectors do not share significant sequence similarity with each other, which can be attributed to rapid divergence and host specialization They share structural properties such as a signal peptide for secretion, absence of transmembrane domains, presence of some motifs, small-medium molecular weight sizes and cysteine-rich content [8,9,10]. Additional fungal effector features have been reported for specific subclasses of effectors, for example, particular genomic locations such as gene clusters, gene-sparse regions or localization in dispensable chromosomes [11]
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