Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: Background
A substantial fraction of genes identified within bacterial genomes encode proteins of unknown function. Identifying which of these proteins represent potential virulence factors, and mapping their key virulence determinants, is a challenging but important goal.Results
To facilitate virulence factor discovery, we performed a comprehensive analysis of 17,929 protein domain families within the Pfam database, and scored them based on their overrepresentation in pathogenic versus non-pathogenic species, taxonomic distribution, relative abundance in metagenomic datasets, and other factors.Conclusions
We identify pathogen-associated domain families, candidate virulence factors in the human gut, and eukaryotic-like mimicry domains with likely roles in virulence. Furthermore, we provide an interactive database called PathFams to allow users to explore pathogen-associated domains as well as identify pathogen-associated domains and domain architectures in user-uploaded sequences of interest. PathFams is freely available at https://pathfams.uwaterloo.ca .
SUBMITTER: Lobb B
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8442362 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature