Fig. 2

Overview of in silico pipeline to identify potential effector proteins from generalist herbivore, Spodoptera litura. Spodoptera litura 4th instar larvae were used for salivary gland isolation. RNA was isolated from two samples; head (mandibular glands) and salivary gland (LSG and VEG) and was sequenced using Illumina platform. Raw reads were processed and later four filtering steps; presence of signal peptide, no transmembrane helices (TMH), extracellular targeting and clustering into families were sequentially applied to obtain a database of in silico secretory proteins and potential effector proteins. Finally, 808 proteins from head and 267 proteins from salivary gland were identified to be potential effector protein encoding genes. Red boxes are the software’s used, corresponding to each filtering step. Taxonomic distribution and functional annotation was performed using six different databases (Nr, UniProt, Pfam, KO, GO, and COG). Numbers shown here are predicted peptides remaining after each step in the pipeline