Comparative bioinformatic and proteomic approaches to evaluate the outer membrane proteome of the fish pathogen Yersinia ruckeri

• Published in: Journal of Proteomics
• Main Authors: Ormsby, Michael J., Grahame, Edward, Burchmore, Richard, Davies, Robert L.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2019
• Subjects: Atlantic salmon; Salmo salar
• Online Access: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/182159/; http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/182159/1/182159.pdf

Yersinia ruckeri is the aetiological agent of enteric redmouth (ERM) disease and is responsible for significant economic losses in farmed salmonids. Enteric redmouth disease is associated primarily with rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss, Walbaum) but its incidence in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is increasing. Outer membrane proteins (OMPs) of Gram-negative bacteria are located at the host-pathogen interface and play important roles in virulence. The outer membrane of Y. ruckeri is poorly characterised and little is known about its composition and the roles of individual OMPs in virulence. Here, we employed a bioinformatic pipeline to first predict the OMP composition of Y. ruckeri. Comparative proteomic approaches were subsequently used to identify those proteins expressed in vitro in eight representative isolates recovered from Atlantic salmon and rainbow trout. One hundred and forty-one OMPs were predicted from four Y. ruckeri genomes and 77 of these were identified in three or more genomes and were considered as “core” proteins. Gel-free and gel-based proteomic approaches together identified 65 OMPs in a single reference isolate and subsequent gel-free analysis identified 64 OMPs in the eight Atlantic salmon and rainbow trout isolates. Together, our gel-free and gel-based proteomic analyses identified 84 unique OMPs in Y. ruckeri.