Abstract (eng)
Protein phosphorylation, being the most widespread posttranslational protein modification, is a key process in cellular signaling. Influencing cell metabolism, proliferation and apoptosis, its regulation is a sophisticated cascade process and the disruption of its regulatory pathways is associated with various diseases. The identification of regulatory protein phosphorylation sites is crucial for understanding cellular signaling. Phosphoproteomic workflows including analysis by mass spectrometry facilitate the identification of phosphorylated proteins and peptides. As phosphopeptides are present in a sub-stoichiometric manner, specific phosphopeptide enrichment strategies are employed, increasing sensitivity towards phosphopeptide species. In order to optimize a phosphoproteomic workflow in terms of enrichment specificity, robustness and proteolytic digestion efficiency, different proteolytic digestion conditions in combination with subsequent titanium dioxide affinity chromatography based phosphopeptide enrichment were evaluated. The evaluation was performed using an in vitro Jurkat cell line model, performing a perturbation study with a phorbol ester as a chemical trigger in order to gain insights into the biological mechanisms driving differentiation of T-lymphocytes. For the evaluation of the drawbacks of normal proteomic analyses for the identification of phosphorylated peptides, results from the obtained phosphoproteome were compared against a background proteome. Sample analysis was performed employing “state-of-the-art” ion mobility mass spectrometry. Additionally, fluorescence cell imaging was performed. Out of the evaluated phosphoproteomic workflows, the overnight digest in combination with titanium dioxide phosphopeptide enrichment yielded the most peptide identifications. A phosphopeptide enrichment factor of 98%, with a total of 11,110 phosphopeptides with 70% class I phosphopeptides, exhibiting highly confident phosphosite positions, was obtained. While the regular proteome showed, as expected, only minor alterations due to the short phorbol ester treatment of three hours, which is not sufficient for greatly altering protein expression, phosphopeptide regulations including phorbol ester binding and endomembrane proteins confirmed a successful treatment, strongly supported by the obtained fluorescence cell images which showed major disturbances in the endomembrane system. Annotation of the identified phosphosites was evaluated via PhosphoSitePlus, highlighting the need for functional phosphoproteomic analyses as half of the phosphosites were not annotated with a function or not annotated at all. The optimized phosphoproteomic workflow was demonstrated to be an important tool for the investigation and comprehensive interpretation of cellular signaling events in proteomic studies.