PathFams: statistical detection of pathogen-associated protein domains.

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. 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. 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 . © 2021. The Author(s).

Citation

Briallen Lobb, Benjamin Jean-Marie Tremblay, Gabriel Moreno-Hagelsieb, Andrew C Doxey. PathFams: statistical detection of pathogen-associated protein domains. BMC genomics. 2021 Sep 14;22(1):663

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PMID: 34521345

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