Based on Taverna workflow technology, which was developed under myGrid, an e-Science project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), it performs a series of analyses on all the proteins produced by a bacterium to create, by a process of selection and elimination, a list of secreted proteins and their properties. The results are stored in a database. Before this new method, researchers would have had to perform these operations manually, often retrieving algorithms for performing the analyses from separate, distributed computers.

The team decided to test their method on 12 members of the Bacillus family. Family members exhibit a variety of behaviours ranging from the friendly Bacillus subtilis, which lives in the soil, promotes plant growth and is used to produce industrial enzymes and vitamins, to the deadly Bacillus anthracis, which causes anthrax. The full complement of proteins produced by the Bacillus family was fed into the workflow. The number of secreted proteins predicted for each member ranged between 350 and 500.

The secreted proteins were then put through a second workflow which placed them into groups of proteins with similar functions. Of particular interest were groups containing proteins secreted only by pathogenic members and only by non-pathogenic members. Secreted proteins unique to the non-pathogenic bacteria have functions that enable them to live in their habitats, whereas almost all of those unique to the pathogenic family members were of unknown function.

The predicted secreted proteins from Bacillus anthracis help to explain its inability to grow in soil. When we looked at the secreted proteins, we found that theyre not adapted to utilise molecules in the soil, says Professor Harwood. However, they do enable Bacillus anthracis to grow in an animal host. Some breakdown an
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Contact: Dr. Anil Wipat
anil.wipat@newcastle.ac.uk
01-912-228-213
Research Councils UK
6-Aug-2007