Computational structural genomics unravels common folds and novel families in the secretome of fungal phytopathogen Magnaporthe oryzae

Kyungyong Seong, Ksenia Krasileva
2021 Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions  
Structural biology has the potential to illuminate the evolution of pathogen effectors and their commonalities that cannot be readily detected at the primary sequence level. Recent breakthroughs in protein structure modeling have demonstrated the feasibility to predict the protein folds without depending on homologous structures. These advances enabled a genome-wide computational structural biology approach to understand proteins based on their predicted folds. In this study, we employed
more » ... re prediction methods on the secretome of the destructive fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae. Out of 1854 secreted proteins, we predicted the folds of 1295 (70%) proteins. We showed that template-free modeling by TrRosetta captured 514 folds missed by homology modeling, including many known effectors and virulence factors, and that TrRosetta generally produced higher quality models for secreted proteins. Along with sensitive homology search, we employed structure-based clustering, defining not only homologous groups with divergent members but also sequence-unrelated structural analogous groups. We demonstrate that this approach can reveal potential new members of structurally similar MAX effectors and novel analogous effector families present in M. oryzae and possibly in other phytopathogens. We also investigated the evolution of expanded putative ADP-ribose transferases with predicted structures. We suggest that the loss of catalytic activities of the enzymes might have led them to new evolutionary trajectories to be specialized as protein binders. Collectively, we propose that computational structural genomics approaches can be an integral part of studying effector biology and provide valuable resources that were inaccessible before the advent of machine learning-based structure prediction.
doi:10.1094/mpmi-03-21-0071-r pmid:34415195 pmcid:PMC9447291 fatcat:rhoxvstnozavpopldp7eeu6m2q