Type VI Secretion System (T6SS) represents a sophisticated class of protein delivery mechanisms, typically comprising approximately 13 core components, which may or may not be accompanied by accessory proteins depending on the species. This system plays a pivotal role in facilitating antagonistic or synergistic interactions between bacteria, as well as between bacteria and eukaryotes. It has been observed to be prevalent among Gram-negative bacterial species and can be categorized into four distinct classes: i, ii, iii, and iv. Among these, the Type i T6SS stands out as the most classical and extensively studied, with further subclassifications including i1, i2, i3, i4a, i4b, and i5.

SecReT6 (Type VI Secretion system Resource) have organized information derived from the reported literature of T6SS gene cluster, T6SR, T6SA, recipient susceptibility factor, as well as T6SE, T6SI and new structure component protein, together with several tools for classification and prediction of T6SS and T6SS-related proteins as the web-based resource.

(1) If your genome sequence is unannotated, you can paste a nucleotide sequence of your genome or upload FASTA format file and run the prediction. In this case, gene-finding tool Prodigal v2.6.3 is first utilized to annotate the sequence before detection of T6SS gene clusters using BLASTp 2.10.1+ or hmmsearch (HMMER v3.3.1).

 

(2) If your genome sequence is already annotated, you can upload GenBank file (GenBank file example) containing both annotations and genome sequence. In this case, DNA sequences of annotated genes would be extracted and translated as queries for BLASTp or hmmsearch.