BIOINFORMATICS ANALYSES OF VIRULENCE EFFECTORS OF TYPE III SECRETION SYSTEM

Abstract

Effectors of bacterial Type III Secretion System (T3SS) play a pivotal role in establishing and maintaining pathogenicity in the host. Therefore, the identification of these effectors is important in understanding virulence. However, they display a high level of sequence diversity, therefore making the identification a difficult process. This thesis focuses on enriched data-warehousing of known effector sequences and its application in the development of computational models for screening and selection of putative novel effectors. Major contributions of the thesis include construction of the first reported specialized database of T3SS effectors with enriched metadata, and the development of a meta-predictor for reliable prediction of effectors. Additionally, a workflow framework has been developed for update of the resource by the community and future developments of sophisticated meta-predictors for practical application in the scanning of bacterial genomes for novel effectors that can be validated by a smaller number of key experiments.