Full Length Research Paper

Prediction and analysis of the secreteomic in Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032

Ning Hao, Yan Li, Ming Yan* and Ping Kai Ouyang

State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, College of Life Science and Pharmaceutical Engineering, Nanjing University of Technology, Nanjing 210009, Jiangsu, P.R. China.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: yanming@njut.edu.cn. Tel: 86-25- 8358-7355.

Accepted 1 February, 2010

   Abstract

Corynebacterium glutamicum is an outstanding organism used for amino acid production. Its ability to secrete L-glutamate has been known for almost fifty years now. The complete nucleotide sequence of C. glutamicum ATCC 13032 genome was previously determined and allowed the reliable prediction of 3056 protein-coding genes within this genome using computational methods. The 3056 open reading frames (ORFs) of C. glutamicum ATCC 13032 were used for the prediction of secreted proteins by bioinformatics approaches, such as SignalP 3.0 and Proteome Analyst. 167 proteins were predicted to be secreted and contain signal peptides, whose amino residues were relatively conserved. Among them, 10 have RR-motif signal peptide and 46 have SignalPaseII signal peptide. Total of 167 secreted proteins have functional descriptions, many of which were enzymes that are involved in metabolism. This prediction method has given good insights into the whole secreted proteome of C. glutamicum and provided basis to further studies of its secretomic features at a genome level.

Key words: Corynebacterium glutamicum, secreted proteins, signal peptides.