About Drosophila Secretome

Secreted proteins play important role in development, physiology, immunity, and cell–cell communication, and many of the signaling pathways that rely on them are highly conserved between Drosophila and humans. Despite the central importance of this class of proteins, no comprehensive, systematically curated catalog of the Drosophila secretome has previously been available to the community. We built Drosophila Secretome by integrating annotation from FlyBase, UniProt, and Gene Ontology with large-scale proteomics datasets and genome-wide computational prediction of signal peptides and subcellular localization. The resource currently contains a tiered catalog of 4,831 genes encoding putative secreted proteins in Drosophila melanogaster. Each gene is assigned a confidence rank as well as a confident score based on the type and strength of supporting evidence, allowing users to distinguish well-supported secreted factors from computationally predicted candidates warranting further validation. To make this resource broadly useful to the community, we developed this searchable web portal that integrates conservation, tissue expression, proteomics cross-references, candidate receptor annotations, and RNAi/transgenic reagent information for each gene, supporting hypothesis generation and experimental design across the Drosophila research community.