Monitoring Functional Post-Translational Modifications Using a
Data-Driven Proteome Informatic Pipeline
Abstract
Post-translational modifications (PTMs) are of significant interest in
molecular biomedicine due to their crucial role in signal transduction
across various cellular and organismal processes. Characterizing PTMs,
distinguishing between functional and inert modifications, quantifying
their occupancies, and understanding PTM crosstalk are challenging tasks
in any biosystem. Studying each PTM often requires a specific,
labor-intensive experimental design. Here, we present a PTM-centric
proteome informatic pipeline for predicting relevant PTMs in mass
spectrometry-based proteomics data without prior information. Once
predicted, these in silico identified PTMs can be incorporated into a
refined database search and compared to measured data. As a practical
application, we demonstrate how this pipeline can be used to study
glycoproteomics in oral squamous cell carcinoma based on the proteome
profile of primary tumors. Subsequently, we experimentally identified
cellular proteins that are differentially expressed in cells treated
with multikinase inhibitors dasatinib and staurosporine using mass
spectrometry-based proteomics. Computational enrichment analysis was
then employed to determine the potential PTMs of differentially
expressed proteins induced by both drugs. Finally, we conducted an
additional round of database search with the predicted PTMs. Our
pipeline successfully analyzed the enriched PTMs and detected proteins
not identified in the initial search. Our findings support the
effectiveness of PTM-centric searching of MS data in proteomics based on
computational enrichment analysis, and we propose integrating this
approach into future proteomics search engines.