An inventory of the Aspergillus niger secretome by combining in silico predictions with shotgun proteomics data

BMC Genomics 11(1):584 (2010) PMID 20959013 PMCID PMC3091731

The ecological niche occupied by a fungal species, its pathogenicity and its usefulness as a microbial cell factory to a large degree depends on its secretome. Protein secretion usually requires the presence of a N-terminal signal peptide (SP) and by scanning for this feature using available highly accurate SP-prediction tools, the fraction of potentially secreted proteins can be directly predicted. However, prediction of a SP does not guarantee that the protein is actually secreted and current in silico prediction methods suffer from gene-model errors introduced during genome annotation.