Proteomic analysis and protein structure prediction of Shigella phage Sfk20 based on a comparative study using structure prediction approaches

Bacteriophages are the natural predators of bacteria and are available abundantly everywhere in nature. Lytic phages can specifically infect their bacterial host (through attachment to the receptor) and use their host replication machinery to replicate rapidly, a feature that enables them to kill a disease-causing bacteria. Hence, phage attachment to the host bacteria is the first important step of the infection process. It is reported in this study that the receptor could be an LPS which is responsible for the attachment of the Sfk20 phage to its host (Shigella flexneri 2a). Phage Sfk20 bacteriolytic activity was examined for preliminary optimization of phage titer. The phage Sfk20 viability at different saline conditions was conducted. The LC–MS/MS technique used here for detecting and identifying 40 Sfk20 phage proteins helped us to get an initial understanding of the structural landscape of phage Sfk20. From the identified proteins, six structurally significant proteins were selected for structure prediction using two neural network systems: AlphaFold2 and ESMFold, and one homology modeling software: Phyre2. Later the performance of these modeling systems was compared using various metrics. We conclude from the available and generated information that AlphaFold2 and Phyre2 perform better than ESMFold for predicting Sfk20 phage protein structures.