SUMMARY
Secretory proteins perform a variety of important“
remote-control” functions for bacterial survival in
the environment. The availability of complete genome sequences has
allowed us to make predictions about the composition of bacterial
machinery for protein secretion as well as the extracellular complement
of bacterial proteomes. Recently, the power of proteomics was
successfully employed to evaluate genome-based models of these
so-called secretomes. Progress in this field is well illustrated by the
proteomic analysis of protein secretion by the gram-positive bacterium
Bacillus subtilis, for which ∼90 extracellular
proteins were identified. Analysis of these proteins disclosed various“
secrets of the secretome,” such as the residence of
cytoplasmic and predicted cell envelope proteins in the extracellular
proteome. This showed that genome-based predictions reflect only∼
50% of the actual composition of the extracellular
proteome of B. subtilis. Importantly, proteomics allowed the
first verification of the impact of individual secretion machinery
components on the total flow of proteins from the cytoplasm to the
extracellular environment. In conclusion, proteomics has yielded a
variety of novel leads for the analysis of protein traffic in B.
subtilis and other gram-positive bacteria. Ultimately, such leads
will serve to increase our understanding of virulence factor biogenesis
in gram-positive pathogens, which is likely to be of high medical
relevance.