Genome analysis of Excretory/Secretory proteins in Taenia solium reveals their Abundance of Antigenic Regions (AAR)

Excretory/Secretory (ES) proteins play an important role in the host-parasite interactions. Experimental identification of ES proteins is time-consuming and expensive. Alternative bioinformatics approaches are cost-effective and can be used to prioritize the experimental analysis of therapeutic targets for parasitic diseases. Here we predicted and functionally annotated the ES proteins in Taenia solium genome using an integration of bioinformatics tools. Additionally, we developed a novel measurement to evaluate the potential antigenicity of Taenia solium secretome using sequence length and number of antigenic regions of ES proteins. This measurement was formalized as the Abundance of Antigenic Regions (AAR) value. AAR value for secretome showed a similar value to that obtained for a set of experimentally determined antigenic proteins and was different to the calculated value for the non-ES proteins of Taenia solium genome. Furthermore, we calculated the AAR values for known helminth secretomes and they were similar to that obtained for Taenia solium. The results reveal the utility of AAR value as a novel genomic measurement to evaluate the potential antigenicity of secretomes. This comprehensive analysis of Taenia solium secretome provides functional information for future experimental studies, including the identification of novel ES proteins of therapeutic, diagnosis and immunological interest.