Quantitative proteomics has traditionally been performed by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, but recently, mass spectrometric methods based on stable isotope quantitation have shown great promise for the simultaneous and automated identification and quantitation of complex protein mixtures. Here we describe a method, termed SILAC, for stable isotope labeling by amino acids in cell culture, for the in vivo incorporation of specific amino acids into all mammalian proteins. Mammalian cell lines are grown in media lacking a standard essential amino acid but supplemented with a non-radioactive, isotopically labeled form of that amino acid, in this case deuterated leucine (Leu-d3). We find that growth of cells maintained in these media is no different from growth in normal media as evidenced by cell morphology, doubling time, and ability to differentiate. Complete incorporation of Leu-d3 occurred after five doublings in the cell lines and proteins studied. Protein populations from experimental and control samples are mixed directly after harvesting, and mass spectrometric identification is straightforward as every leucine-containing peptide incorporates either all normal leucine or all Leu-d3. We have applied this technique to the relative quantitation of changes in protein expression during the process of muscle cell differentiation. Proteins that were found to be up-regulated during this process include glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, fibronectin, and pyruvate kinase M2. SILAC is a simple, inexpensive, and accurate procedure that can be used as a quantitative proteomic approach in any cell culture system.

Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD) is an object database that integrates a wealth of information relevant to the function of human proteins in health and disease. Data pertaining to thousands of protein-protein interactions, posttranslational modifications, enzyme/substrate relationships, disease associations, tissue expression, and subcellular localization were extracted from the literature for a nonredundant set of 2750 human proteins. Almost all the information was obtained manually by biologists who read and interpreted >300,000 published articles during the annotation process. This database, which has an intuitive query interface allowing easy access to all the features of proteins, was built by using open source technologies and will be freely available at http://www.hprd.org to the academic community. This unified bioinformatics platform will be useful in cataloging and mining the large number of proteomic interactions and alterations that will be discovered in the postgenomic era.

Protein S-acylation (palmitoylation), a reversible post-translational modification, is critically involved in regulating protein subcellular localization, activity, stability, and multimeric complex assembly. However, proteome scale characterization of S-acylation has lagged far behind that of phosphorylation, and global analysis of the localization of S-acylated proteins within different membrane domains has not been reported. Here we describe a novel proteomics approach, designated palmitoyl protein identification and site characterization (PalmPISC), for proteome scale enrichment and characterization of S-acylated proteins extracted from lipid raft-enriched and non-raft membranes. In combination with label-free spectral counting quantitation, PalmPISC led to the identification of 67 known and 331 novel candidate S-acylated proteins as well as the localization of 25 known and 143 novel candidate S-acylation sites. Palmitoyl acyltransferases DHHC5, DHHC6, and DHHC8 appear to be S-acylated on three cysteine residues within a novel CCX(7-13)C(S/T) motif downstream of a conserved Asp-His-His-Cys cysteine-rich domain, which may be a potential mechanism for regulating acyltransferase specificity and/or activity. S-Acylation may tether cytoplasmic acyl-protein thioesterase-1 to membranes, thus facilitating its interaction with and deacylation of membrane-associated S-acylated proteins. Our findings also suggest that certain ribosomal proteins may be targeted to lipid rafts via S-acylation, possibly to facilitate regulation of ribosomal protein activity and/or dynamic synthesis of lipid raft proteins in situ. In addition, bioinformatics analysis suggested that S-acylated proteins are highly enriched within core complexes of caveolae and tetraspanin-enriched microdomains, both cholesterol-rich membrane structures. The PalmPISC approach and the large scale human S-acylated protein data set are expected to provide powerful tools to facilitate our understanding of the functions and mechanisms of protein S-acylation.

The mass spectrometric analysis of protein phosphorylation is still far from being routine, and the outcomes thereof are often unsatisfying. Apart from the inherent problem of substoichiometric phosphorylation, three arguments as to why phosphorylation analysis is so problematic are often quoted, including (a) increased hydrophilicity of the phosphopeptide with a concomitant loss during the loading onto reversed-phase columns, (b) selective suppression of the ionization of phosphopeptides in the presence of unmodified peptides, and (c) lower ionization/detection efficiencies of phosphopeptides as compared with their unmodified cognates. Here we present the results of a study investigating the validity of these three arguments when using electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. We utilized a set of synthetic peptide/phosphopeptide pairs that were quantitated by amino acid analysis. Under the applied conditions none of the experiments performed supports the notions of (a) generally increased risks of losing phosphopeptides during the loading onto the reversed-phase column because of decreased retention and (b) the selective ionization suppression of phosphopeptides. The issue of ionization/detection efficiencies of phosphopeptides versus their unphosphorylated cognates proved to be less straightforward when using electrospray ionization because no evidence for decreased ionization/detection efficiencies for phosphopeptides could be found.