Perspectives of Secretome Proteomics in Filamentous Fungi

Filamentous fungi are eukaryotic protein factories having greater relevance in the modern day food and pharmaceutical industries. They are known for their astounding potential towards biodegradation and mineralization of xenobiotics and lignocellulosics. This unique Kingdom of organisms play an inevitable role in environmental cleanup and make up, adapting themselves by way of regulating their bound and secretary proteins. They make changes in the proteome composition and provide exciting opportunities in food, feed, biofuel, pharmaceutical and agroindustries. Overview of proteomic strategies in filamentous fungi with respect to extracellular proteomes, enzymes or secretomes will have greater relevance to understand the bio-based processes, such as biomass deconstruction and mycoremediation, wherein fungi are primarily involved. Scientists of “Proteogenomics Era” try to use customized protein sequence databases to identify novel peptides in filamentous fungi. Proteomics techniques can help to elucidate complex biological processes and are considered as powerful tools for the sensitive detection and rapid identification of filamentous fungi through protein expression understanding the interaction between fungal pathogen and host plant is more challenging. The expression of protein profiles in such cases is much complicated due to the presence of proteomes of two different species simultaneously, either at the infection court or at a remote place inside the partnering organisms. When the plant and its associated fungal biome is subjected to genomic analysis, the power of proteomics remains to be the chosen tool to unravel the molecular pathways of pathogencity and resistance. Sometimes, in a compatible partnership like in mycorrhiza, the proteomics tools and techniques help to understand the symbiotic relationship. Experimental designs have also progressed extensively towards organelle proteomics and the knowledge on localization of proteins is of overriding importance to understand functions of various proteins at sub-cellular level. Organelle proteomics has gained insights in to compartmentalization and localization that exists in a fungal cell with respect to protein secretomes (e.g. production and process control of antibiotics, organic acids, enzymes etc.,). Bioinformatics tools can help in the quantitative and qualitative estimation of such proteins to look beyond harnessing the full potential of filamentous fungi.