Identification of secreted bacterial proteins by noncanonical amino acid tagging

Abstract

Microbial pathogens use complex secretion systems to deliver virulence factors into host cells, where they disrupt host cell function. Understanding these systems is essential to the development of new treatments for infectious disease. A challenge in such studies arises from the abundance of host cell proteins, which interfere with detection of microbial effectors. Here we describe a metabolic labeling strategy that allows selective enrichment of microbial proteins from the host cell cytoplasm. The method enables efficient identification of microbial proteins that have been delivered to the host, identifies distinct secretion profiles for intracellular and extracellular bacteria, and allows for determination of the order of injection of microbial proteins into host cells.