Lysine Acetylation Catalog: Covalent posttranslational modification is an essential cellular regulatory mechanism by which the activity of proteins can be controlled. Advances in mass spectrometry made it possible for Choudhary et al. (p. 834 , published online 16 July) to assess the prevalence of lysine acetylation throughout the whole proteome. Acetylation is much more widespread than previously appreciated and occurs on proteins participating in all sorts of biological functions. Acetylation can influence susceptibility of proteins to phosphorylation and occurs frequently on enzymes that control the modification of other proteins by covalent ubiquitination and on proteins that form large macromolecular complexes. The findings also help to characterize the actions of lysine deacetylase inhibitors, which have shown clinical promise in treatments for cancer.

Post-translational modification of proteins by ubiquitin is a fundamentally important regulatory mechanism. However, proteome-wide analysis of endogenous ubiquitylation remains a challenging task, and almost always has relied on cells expressing affinity tagged ubiquitin. Here we combine single-step immunoenrichment of ubiquitylated peptides with peptide fractionation and high-resolution mass spectrometry to investigate endogenous ubiquitylation sites. We precisely map 11,054 endogenous putative ubiquitylation sites (diglycine-modified lysines) on 4,273 human proteins. The presented data set covers 67% of the known ubiquitylation sites and contains 10,254 novel sites on proteins with diverse cellular functions including cell signaling, receptor endocytosis, DNA replication, DNA damage repair, and cell cycle progression. Our method enables site-specific quantification of ubiquitylation in response to cellular perturbations and is applicable to any cell type or tissue. Global quantification of ubiquitylation in cells treated with the proteasome inhibitor MG-132 discovers sites that are involved in proteasomal degradation, and suggests a nonproteasomal function for almost half of all sites. Surprisingly, ubiquitylation of about 15% of sites decreased more than twofold within four hours of MG-132 treatment, showing that inhibition of proteasomal function can dramatically reduce ubiquitylation on many sites with non-proteasomal functions. Comparison of ubiquitylation sites with acetylation sites reveals an extensive overlap between the lysine residues targeted by these two modifications. However, the crosstalk between these two post-translational modifications is significantly less frequent on sites that show increased ubiquitylation upon proteasome inhibition. Taken together, we report the largest site-specific ubiquitylation dataset in human cells, and for the first time demonstrate proteome-wide, site-specific quantification of endogenous putative ubiquitylation sites.

Intrinsically disordered proteins can phase separate from the soluble intracellular space, and tend to aggregate under pathological conditions. The physiological functions and molecular triggers of liquid demixing by phase separation are not well understood. Here we show in vitro and in vivo that the nucleic acid-mimicking biopolymer poly(ADP-ribose) (PAR) nucleates intracellular liquid demixing. PAR levels are markedly induced at sites of DNA damage, and we provide evidence that PAR-seeded liquid demixing results in rapid, yet transient and fully reversible assembly of various intrinsically disordered proteins at DNA break sites. Demixing, which relies on electrostatic interactions between positively charged RGG repeats and negatively charged PAR, is amplified by aggregation-prone prion-like domains, and orchestrates the earliest cellular responses to DNA breakage. We propose that PAR-seeded liquid demixing is a general mechanism to dynamically reorganize the soluble nuclear space with implications for pathological protein aggregation caused by derailed phase separation.

This study investigates the challenge of comprehensively cataloging the complete human proteome from a single-cell type using mass spectrometry (MS)-based shotgun proteomics. We modify a classical two-dimensional high-resolution reversed-phase peptide fractionation scheme and optimize a protocol that provides sufficient peak capacity to saturate the sequencing speed of modern MS instruments. This strategy enables the deepest proteome of a human single-cell type to date, with the HeLa proteome sequenced to a depth of ∼584,000 unique peptide sequences and ∼14,200 protein isoforms (∼12,200 protein-coding genes). This depth is comparable with next-generation RNA sequencing and enables the identification of post-translational modifications, including ∼7,000 N-acetylation sites and ∼10,000 phosphorylation sites, without the need for enrichment. We further demonstrate the general applicability and clinical potential of this proteomics strategy by comprehensively quantifying global proteome expression in several different human cancer cell lines and patient tissue samples.