Similar to plant pathogens, phloem-feeding insects such as aphids deliver effector proteins inside their hosts that act to promote host susceptibility and enable feeding and infestation. Despite exciting progress toward identifying and characterizing effector proteins from these insects, their functions remain largely unknown. The recent groundbreaking development in protein structure prediction algorithms, combined with the availability of proteomics and transcriptomic datasets for agriculturally important pests, provides new opportunities to explore the structural and functional diversity of effector repertoires. In this study, we sought to gain insight into the infection strategy used by the Myzus persicae (green peach aphid) by predicting and analyzing the structures of a set of 71 effector candidate proteins. We used two protein structure prediction methods, AlphaFold and OmegaFold, that produced mutually consistent results. We observed a wide continuous spectrum of structures among the effector candidates, from disordered proteins to globular enzymes. We made use of the structural information and state-of-the-art computational methods to predict M. persicae effector protein properties, including function and interaction with host plant proteins. Overall, our investigation provides novel insights into prediction of structure, function, and interaction of M. persicae effector proteins and will guide the necessary experimental characterization to address new hypotheses.

Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.

与植物病原体类似，以韧皮部为食的昆虫（例如蚜虫）会在宿主体内传递效应蛋白，从而提高宿主的易感性并促进进食和侵染。尽管在识别和表征这些昆虫的效应蛋白方面取得了令人兴奋的进展，但它们的功能仍然很大程度上未知。最近蛋白质结构预测算法的突破性发展，加上农业上重要害虫的蛋白质组学和转录组数据集的可用性，为探索效应子库的结构和功能多样性提供了新的机会。在这项研究中，我们试图通过预测和分析一组 71 个效应候选蛋白的结构来深入了解桃蚜（ Myzus persicae ）所使用的感染策略。我们使用了两种蛋白质结构预测方法 AlphaFold 和 OmegaFold，它们产生了相互一致的结果。我们观察到候选效应器中广泛的连续结构，从无序蛋白质到球状酶。我们利用结构信息和最先进的计算方法来预测桃桃效应蛋白特性，包括功能和与宿主植物蛋白的相互作用。总的来说，我们的研究为桃桃效应蛋白的结构、功能和相互作用的预测提供了新的见解，并将指导必要的实验表征以解决新的假设。

版权所有 © 2024 作者。这是一篇根据 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 国际许可证分发的开放获取文章。