Development of computational models of the chlamydial interactomes and of bacterial secreted proteins.

Chlamydiae are a group of bacteria that comprise environmental species living as symbionts in lower eukaryotes and human-pathogenic bacteria. Their intra-cellular lifestyle makes the understanding of their molecular biology and host interactions a rather challenging effort. Interaction networks of these species have been predicted by bioinformatics methods applied to identify functional sub-systems (called 'functional modules'). These modules have been used for protein function prediction and to identify virulence related proteins. The evolution of these modules due to the adaptation level on the respective hosts has been investigated indicating which functionalities have been lost due to host adaptation. The major transport route of effector proteins from many Gram(-) bacterial into their host cells is the Type III secretion apparatus. It could be shown, that the recognition signal leading to specific transport is taxonomically universal and can be modeled computationally. The resulting software-package (EffectiveT3) allows the generation of high confident effector candidate lists from sequence information that will accelerate the characterization of novel effectors