bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/237255; this version posted December 21, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. Comprehensive analysis of Verticillium nonalfalfae in silico secretome uncovers putative effector proteins expressed during hop invasion 1 Kristina Marton1, Marko Flajšman1, Sebastjan Radišek2, Katarina Košmelj1, Jernej Jakše1, 2 Branka Javornik1, Sabina Berne1* 3 1Department of Agronomy, Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia 4 2Slovenian Institute of Hop Research and Brewing, Žalec, Slovenia 5 * Correspondence: 6 Sabina Berne 7
[email protected] 8 Abstract 9 Background: The vascular plant pathogen Verticillium nonalfalfae causes Verticillium wilt in several 10 important crops. VnaSSP4.2 was recently discovered as a V. nonalfalfae virulence effector protein in 11 the xylem sap of infected hop. Here, we expanded our search for candidate secreted effector proteins 12 (CSEPs) in the V. nonalfalfae predicted secretome using a bioinformatic pipeline built on V. 13 nonalfalfae genome data, RNA-Seq and proteomic studies of the interaction with hop. 14 Results: The secretome, rich in carbohydrate active enzymes, proteases, redox proteins and proteins 15 involved in secondary metabolism, cellular processing and signaling, includes 263 CSEPs. Several 16 homologs of known fungal effectors (LysM, NLPs, Hce2, Cerato-platanins, Cyanovirin-N lectins, 17 hydrophobins and CFEM domain containing proteins) and avirulence determinants in the PHI 18 database (Avr-Pita1 and MgSM1) were found. The majority of CSEPs were non-annotated and were bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/237255; this version posted December 21, 2017.