پیش‌بینی برهمکنش پروتئین-پروتئین بین پسیل آسیایی مرکبات(Diaphorina citri (Hem.: Psyllidae و Wolbachia با رویکرد های دامنه پروتئینی و اینترلوگی

The Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri is one of the most important citrus pests in the southern region of Iran, causing damage to citrus trees through feeding on plant sap and excessive honeydew secretion. This pest is a vector for the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus, which is responsible for the devastating citrus greening disease. One of the obligatory intracellular bacteria present in D. citri is Wolbachia, a Gram-negative reproductively parasitic bacterium that can induce cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) in insects. CI is the most common reproductive manipulation induced by this bacterium. Wolbachia has potential applications in genetic population manipulation and control of certain diseases' vectors, making it important in integrated pest management programs for controlling D. citri. Since experimental investigation of host-pathogen interactome is time-consuming and costly, computational bioinformatics methods can be used to accurately predict protein-protein interactions (PPIs). It is necessary to use these computational methods to identify interacting proteins. Therefore, the function of proteins that play a key role in control mechanisms can be predicted. In this study, to investigate PPIs, the proteome sequences of Wolbachia strain KPSwDI05P26 and D. citri were obtained from the NCBI database. The protein data was clustered using CD-HIT analysis and proteins with a redundancy degree of 0.9 were removed as paralogs. Subsequently, the sub-cellular localization of proteins was determined using the BUSCA and DeepLoc-2.0 databases. Finally, the protein interaction network between Wolbachia and D. citri was plotted in the HPIDB-3.0 database. In this study, the computational methods mentioned utilize an interolog-based method relying on protein sequence similarity to predict PPIs. It is predicted that a Wolbachia protein and a D. citri protein may interact with each other if there is experimental evidence of confirmed interaction between their respective homologous proteins in another organism. In the sub-cellular localization analysis, proteins located in the cytoplasm and cytoplasmic membrane were removed, leaving 861 secreted proteins for interolog analysis. The Interolog-based method with Blastp (E-value 10-5) and other default parameters predicts 627 interactions, including 602 D. citri proteins and 25 Wolbachia proteins at the proteome scale. This study predicts the PPI network between Wolbachia and D. citri. The computational methods provide a reasonable number of interactions. These predictive models can be used for genetic and microbial control methods of D. citri.