Low-Background Acyl-Biotinyl Exchange Largely Eliminates the Coisolation of Non- S-Acylated Proteins and Enables Deep S-Acylproteomic Analysis

Anal Chem. 2019 Aug 6;91(15):9858-9866. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.9b01520. Epub 2019 Jul 11.

Abstract

Protein S-acylation (also called palmitoylation) is a common post-translational modification whose deregulation plays a key role in the pathogenesis of many diseases. Acyl-biotinyl exchange (ABE), a widely used method for the enrichment of S-acylated proteins, has the potential of capturing the entire S-acylproteome in any type of biological sample. Here, we showed that current ABE methods suffer from a high background arising from the coisolation of non-S-acylated proteins. The background can be substantially reduced by an additional blockage of residual free cysteine residues with 2,2'-dithiodipyridine prior to the biotin-HPDP reaction. Coupling the low-background ABE (LB-ABE) method with label-free proteomics, 2 895 high-confidence candidate S-acylated proteins (including 1 591 known S-acylated proteins) were identified from human prostate cancer LNCaP cells, representing so-far the largest S-acylproteome data set identified in a single study. Immunoblotting analysis confirmed the S-acylation of five known and five novel prostate cancer-related S-acylated proteins in LNCaP cells and suggested that their S-acylation levels were about 0.6-1.8%. In summary, the LB-ABE method largely eliminates the coisolation of non-S-acylated proteins and enables deep S-acylproteomic analysis. It is expected to facilitate a much more comprehensive and accurate quantification of S-acylproteomes than previous ABE methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Acylation
  • Biotinylation
  • Buffers
  • Cell Line, Tumor
  • Cysteine / chemistry
  • Humans
  • Proteome / chemistry
  • Proteome / isolation & purification*
  • Proteome / metabolism*
  • Proteomics / methods*
  • Purines / chemistry

Substances

  • Buffers
  • Proteome
  • Purines
  • Cysteine
  • purine