Computational modeling and experimental validation of the Legionella and Coxiella virulence-related type-IVB secretion signal.

ABSTRACT: Legionella and Coxiella are intracellular pathogens that use the virulence-related Icm/Dot type-IVB secretion system to translocate effector proteins into host cells during infection. These effectors were previously shown to contain a C-terminal secretion signal required for their translocation. In this research, we implemented a hidden semi-Markov model to characterize the amino acid composition of the signal, thus providing a comprehensive computational model for the secretion signal. This model accounts for dependencies among sites and captures spatial variation in amino acid composition along the secretion signal. To validate our model, we predicted and synthetically constructed an optimal secretion signal whose sequence is different from that of any known effector. We show that this s

SUBMITTER: Lifshitz Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3581968 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature