Pervasive sublethal effects of agrochemicals on insects at environmentally relevant concentrations.

Insect biomass is declining globally, likely driven by climate change and pesticide use, yet systematic studies on the effects of various chemicals remain limited. In this work, we used a chemical library of 1024 molecules-covering insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and plant growth inhibitors-to assess the impact of sublethal pesticide doses on insects. In Drosophila melanogaster, 57% of chemicals affected larval behavior, and a higher proportion compromised long-term survivability. Exposure to sublethal doses also induced widespread changes in the phosphoproteome and changes in development and reproduction. The negative effects of agrochemicals were amplified when the temperature was increased. We observed similar behavioral changes across multiple insect species, including mosquitoes and butterflies. These findings suggest that widespread sublethal pesticide exposure can alter insect behavior and physiology, threatening long-term population survival.

Protein-Peptide Turnover Profiling reveals the order of PTM addition and removal during protein maturation.

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) regulate various aspects of protein function, including degradation. Mass spectrometric methods relying on pulsed metabolic labeling are popular to quantify turnover rates on a proteome-wide scale. Such data have traditionally been interpreted in the context of protein proteolytic stability. Here, we combine theoretical kinetic modeling with experimental pulsed stable isotope labeling of amino acids in cell culture (pSILAC) for the study of protein phosphorylation. We demonstrate that metabolic labeling combined with PTM-specific enrichment does not measure effects of PTMs on protein stability. Rather, it reveals the relative order of PTM addition and removal along a protein's lifetime-a fundamentally different metric. This is due to interconversion of the measured proteoform species. Using this framework, we identify temporal phosphorylation sites on cell cycle-specific factors and protein complex assembly intermediates. Our results thus allow tying PTMs to the age of the modified proteins.

Systematic discovery of biomolecular condensate-specific protein phosphorylation.

Reversible protein phosphorylation is an important mechanism for regulating (dis)assembly of biomolecular condensates. However, condensate-specific phosphosites remain largely unknown, thereby limiting our understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Here, we combine solubility proteome profiling with phosphoproteomics to quantitatively map several hundred phosphosites enriched in either soluble or condensate-bound protein subpopulations, including a subset of phosphosites modulating protein-RNA interactions. We show that multi-phosphorylation of the C-terminal disordered segment of heteronuclear ribonucleoprotein A1 (HNRNPA1), a key RNA-splicing factor, reduces its ability to locate to nuclear clusters. For nucleophosmin 1 (NPM1), an essential nucleolar protein, we show that phosphorylation of S254 and S260 is crucial for lowering its partitioning to the nucleolus and additional phosphorylation of distal sites enhances its retention in the nucleoplasm. These phosphorylation events decrease RNA and protein interactions of NPM1 to regulate its condensation. Our dataset is a rich resource for systematically uncovering the phosphoregulation of biomolecular condensates.

High-throughput functional characterization of protein phosphorylation sites in yeast.

Phosphorylation is a critical post-translational modification involved in the regulation of almost all cellular processes. However, fewer than 5% of thousands of recently discovered phosphosites have been functionally annotated. In this study, we devised a chemical genetic approach to study the functional relevance of phosphosites in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We generated 474 yeast strains with mutations in specific phosphosites that were screened for fitness in 102 conditions, along with a gene deletion library. Of these phosphosites, 42% exhibited growth phenotypes, suggesting that these are more likely functional. We inferred their function based on the similarity of their growth profiles with that of gene deletions and validated a subset by thermal proteome profiling and lipidomics. A high fraction exhibited phenotypes not seen in the corresponding gene deletion, suggestive of a gain-of-function effect. For phosphosites conserved in humans, the severity of the yeast phenotypes is indicative of their human functional relevance. This high-throughput approach allows for functionally characterizing individual phosphosites at scale.

Global mapping of Salmonella enterica-host protein-protein interactions during infection.

Intracellular bacterial pathogens inject effector proteins to hijack host cellular processes and promote their survival and proliferation. To systematically map effector-host protein-protein interactions (PPIs) during infection, we generated a library of 32 Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (STm) strains expressing chromosomally encoded affinity-tagged effectors and quantified PPIs in macrophages and epithelial cells. We identified 446 effector-host PPIs, 25 of which were previously described, and validated 13 by reciprocal co-immunoprecipitation. While effectors converged on the same host cellular processes, most had multiple targets, which often differed between cell types. We demonstrate that SseJ, SseL, and SifA modulate cholesterol accumulation at the Salmonella-containing vacuole (SCV) partially via the cholesterol transporter Niemann-Pick C1 protein. PipB recruits the organelle contact site protein PDZD8 to the SCV, and SteC promotes actin bundling by phosphorylating formin-like proteins. This study provides a method for probing host-pathogen PPIs during infection and a resource for interrogating STm effector mechanisms.

A genetic analysis reveals novel histone residues required for transcriptional reprogramming upon stress.

Cells have the ability to sense, respond and adapt to environmental fluctuations. Stress causes a massive reorganization of the transcriptional program. Many examples of histone post-translational modifications (PTMs) have been associated with transcriptional activation or repression under steady-state growth conditions. Comparatively less is known about the role of histone PTMs in the cellular adaptive response to stress. Here, we performed high-throughput genetic screenings that provide a novel global map of the histone residues required for transcriptional reprogramming in response to heat and osmotic stress. Of note, we observed that the histone residues needed depend on the type of gene and/or stress, thereby suggesting a 'personalized', rather than general, subset of histone requirements for each chromatin context. In addition, we identified a number of new residues that unexpectedly serve to regulate transcription. As a proof of concept, we characterized the function of the histone residues H4-S47 and H4-T30 in response to osmotic and heat stress, respectively. Our results uncover novel roles for the kinases Cla4 and Ste20, yeast homologs of the mammalian PAK2 family, and the Ste11 MAPK as regulators of H4-S47 and H4-T30, respectively. This study provides new insights into the role of histone residues in transcriptional regulation under stress conditions.

Gaining Confidence in the Elusive Histidine Phosphoproteome.

Recent technological advances have made it possible to investigate the hitherto rather elusive protein histidine phosphorylation. However, confident site-specific localization of protein histidine phosphorylation remains challenging. Here, we address this problem, presenting a mass-spectrometry-based approach that outperforms classical HCD fragmentation without compromising sensitivity. We use the phosphohistidine immonium ion as a diagnostic tool as well as ETD-based fragmentation techniques to achieve unambiguous identification and localization of histidine-phosphorylation sites. The work presented here will allow more confident investigation of the phosphohistidine proteome to reveal the roles of histidine phosphorylation in cellular signaling events.

A New Tool to Reveal Bacterial Signaling Mechanisms in Antibiotic Treatment and Resistance.

The rapid emergence of antimicrobial resistance is a major threat to human health. Antibiotics modulate a wide range of biological processes in bacteria and as such, the study of bacterial cellular signaling could aid the development of urgently needed new antibiotic agents. Due to the advances in bacterial phosphoproteomics, such a systemwide analysis of bacterial signaling in response to antibiotics has recently become feasible. Here we present a dynamic view of differential protein phosphorylation upon antibiotic treatment and antibiotic resistance. Most strikingly, differential phosphorylation was observed on highly conserved residues of resistance regulating transcription factors, implying a previously unanticipated role of phosphorylation mediated regulation. Using the comprehensive phosphoproteomics data presented here as a resource, future research can now focus on deciphering the precise signaling mechanisms contributing to resistance, eventually leading to alternative strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance.

Mix and match of the tumor metastasis suppressor Nm23 protein isoforms in vitro and in vivo.

Nm23/NME was identified 30 years ago as the first metastatic gene suppressor family. Despite extensive studies, the mechanism of action behind the observed antimetastatic potential of Nm23 has remained largely unresolved. Human Nm23 is present in various isoforms, of which Nm23-H1 and Nm23-H2 are by far the most dominant. Both isoforms are multifunctional enzymes involved in important cellular processes, through their nucleic acid binding ability, their protein-protein interactions and/or their histidine kinase activity. Although Nm23-H1 and Nm23-H2 exhibit 88% sequence homology, they often are considered to have distinct biological functions. Here, we developed an efficient and robust purification protocol to pull-down Nm23 isoforms in their native state. We applied this protocol to purify both overexpressed isoform pure as well as endogenous Nm23 proteins from several human cell lines and mouse brain tissue. Subsequent native mass spectrometry (MS) analysis revealed that all purified Nm23 samples form hexamers, whereby the endogenous protein assembly is primarily present as heterohexamers formed by statistical association of the Nm23-H1 and Nm23-H2 isoforms. Therefore, we conclude that isoform-pure hexameric Nm23 complexes scarcely exist in vivo. We also used native and top-down MS to investigate the histidine autophosphorylation activity of purified Nm23 assemblies. Our data in fine challenge the biological relevance of studying the genes/proteins Nm23-H1 and Nm23-H2 individually.

Defeating Major Contaminants in Fe3+- Immobilized Metal Ion Affinity Chromatography (IMAC) Phosphopeptide Enrichment.

Here we demonstrate that biomolecular contaminants, such as nucleic acid molecules, can seriously interfere with immobilized metal ion affinity chromatography (IMAC)-based phosphopeptide enrichments. We address and largely solve this issue, developing a robust protocol implementing methanol/chloroform protein precipitation and enzymatic digestion using benzonase, which degrades all forms of DNA and RNA, before IMAC-column loading. This simple procedure resulted in a drastic increase of enrichment sensitivity, enabling the identification of around 17,000 unique phosphopeptides and 12,500 unambiguously localized phosphosites in human cell-lines from a single LC-MS/MS run, constituting a 50% increase when compared with the standard protocol. The improved protocol was also applied to bacterial samples, increasing the number of identified bacterial phosphopeptides even more strikingly, by a factor 10, when compared with the standard protocol. For E. coli we detected around 1300 unambiguously localized phosphosites per LC-MS/MS run. The preparation of these ultra-pure phosphopeptide samples only requires marginal extra costs and sample preparation time and should thus be adoptable by every laboratory active in the field of phosphoproteomics.

Widespread bacterial protein histidine phosphorylation revealed by mass spectrometry-based proteomics.

For decades, major difficulties in analyzing histidine phosphorylation have limited the study of phosphohistidine signaling. Here we report a method revealing widespread and abundant protein histidine phosphorylation in Escherichia coli. We generated an extensive E. coli phosphoproteome data set, in which a remarkably high percentage (∼10%) of phosphorylation sites are phosphohistidine sites. This resource should help enable a better understanding of the biological function of histidine phosphorylation.

Implementation of Ultraviolet Photodissociation on a Benchtop Q Exactive Mass Spectrometer and Its Application to Phosphoproteomics.

Proteomics applications performed on the popular benchtop Q Exactive Orbitrap mass spectrometer have so far relied exclusively on higher collision-energy dissociation (HCD) fragmentation for peptide sequencing. While this fragmentation technique is applicable to a wide range of biological questions, it also has limitations, and all questions cannot be addressed equally well. Here, we demonstrate that the fragmentation capabilities of the Q Exactive mass spectrometer can be extended with ultraviolet photodissociation (UVPD) fragmentation, complete with synchronization triggering to make it compatible with liquid chromatography (LC)/tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) workflows. We show that UVPD not only is directly compatible with LC/MS workflows but also, when combined with these workflows, can result in higher database scores and increased identification rates for complex samples as compared to HCD methods. UVPD as a fragmentation technique offers prompt, high-energy fragmentation, which can potentially lead to improved analyses of labile post-translational modifications. Techniques like HCD result in substantial amounts of modification losses, competing with fragmentation pathways that provide information-rich ion fragments. We investigate here the utility of UVPD for identification of phosphorylated peptides and find that UVPD fragmentation reduces the extent of labile modification loss by up to ∼60%. Collectively, when integrated into a complete workflow on the Q Exactive Orbitrap, UVPD provides distinct advantages to the analysis of post-translational modifications and is a powerful and complementary addition to the proteomic toolbox.