Annotation Resource of Tandem Repeat-containing Secretory Proteins in Sixty Fungi

Annotation of fungal secretory proteins mainly relies on outward comparison methods such as BLAST or hidden Markov model. These approaches are reaching a bottle neck for annotating fungal effectors which rarely contain conserved motif. In desire of more sequence features for annotating and prioritizing fungal effectors of interest, this study develops a pipeline to identify tandem repeat (TR) within each sequence of putative secretory proteins and search if any type of TR in the non-orthologous secretory proteins remains evolutionarily conserved for plant pathogenicity. There were 2,804 types of TR units and a total of 2,925 TR-containing secretory proteins were found from 60 fungi. There was rare conserved type of TR shared by plant pathogenic fungi, indicating functional divergence for different types TR and TR-containing secretory proteins. The annotation resource of fungal TR-containing secretory proteins provides new sequence features that will be useful for the community interested in the fungal effector biology.