The intrinsic substrate specificity of the human tyrosine kinome.

Phosphorylation of proteins on tyrosine (Tyr) residues evolved in metazoan organisms as a mechanism of coordinating tissue growth1. Multicellular eukaryotes typically have more than 50 distinct protein Tyr kinases that catalyse the phosphorylation of thousands of Tyr residues throughout the proteome1-3. How a given Tyr kinase can phosphorylate a specific subset of proteins at unique Tyr sites is only partially understood4-7. Here we used combinatorial peptide arrays to profile the substrate sequence specificity of all human Tyr kinases. Globally, the Tyr kinases demonstrate considerable diversity in optimal patterns of residues surrounding the site of phosphorylation, revealing the functional organization of the human Tyr kinome by substrate motif preference. Using this information, Tyr kinases that are most compatible with phosphorylating any Tyr site can be identified. Analysis of mass spectrometry phosphoproteomic datasets using this compendium of kinase specificities accurately identifies specific Tyr kinases that are dysregulated in cells after stimulation with growth factors, treatment with anti-cancer drugs or expression of oncogenic variants. Furthermore, the topology of known Tyr signalling networks naturally emerged from a comparison of the sequence specificities of the Tyr kinases and the SH2 phosphotyrosine (pTyr)-binding domains. Finally we show that the intrinsic substrate specificity of Tyr kinases has remained fundamentally unchanged from worms to humans, suggesting that the fidelity between Tyr kinases and their protein substrate sequences has been maintained across hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

An atlas of substrate specificities for the human serine/threonine kinome.

Protein phosphorylation is one of the most widespread post-translational modifications in biology1,2. With advances in mass-spectrometry-based phosphoproteomics, 90,000 sites of serine and threonine phosphorylation have so far been identified, and several thousand have been associated with human diseases and biological processes3,4. For the vast majority of phosphorylation events, it is not yet known which of the more than 300 protein serine/threonine (Ser/Thr) kinases encoded in the human genome are responsible3. Here we used synthetic peptide libraries to profile the substrate sequence specificity of 303 Ser/Thr kinases, comprising more than 84% of those predicted to be active in humans. Viewed in its entirety, the substrate specificity of the kinome was substantially more diverse than expected and was driven extensively by negative selectivity. We used our kinome-wide dataset to computationally annotate and identify the kinases capable of phosphorylating every reported phosphorylation site in the human Ser/Thr phosphoproteome. For the small minority of phosphosites for which the putative protein kinases involved have been previously reported, our predictions were in excellent agreement. When this approach was applied to examine the signalling response of tissues and cell lines to hormones, growth factors, targeted inhibitors and environmental or genetic perturbations, it revealed unexpected insights into pathway complexity and compensation. Overall, these studies reveal the intrinsic substrate specificity of the human Ser/Thr kinome, illuminate cellular signalling responses and provide a resource to link phosphorylation events to biological pathways.

Host protein kinases required for SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid phosphorylation and viral replication.

Multiple coronaviruses have emerged independently in the past 20 years that cause lethal human diseases. Although vaccine development targeting these viruses has been accelerated substantially, there remain patients requiring treatment who cannot be vaccinated or who experience breakthrough infections. Understanding the common host factors necessary for the life cycles of coronaviruses may reveal conserved therapeutic targets. Here, we used the known substrate specificities of mammalian protein kinases to deconvolute the sequence of phosphorylation events mediated by three host protein kinase families (SRPK, GSK-3, and CK1) that coordinately phosphorylate a cluster of serine and threonine residues in the viral N protein, which is required for viral replication. We also showed that loss or inhibition of SRPK1/2, which we propose initiates the N protein phosphorylation cascade, compromised the viral replication cycle. Because these phosphorylation sites are highly conserved across coronaviruses, inhibitors of these protein kinases not only may have therapeutic potential against COVID-19 but also may be broadly useful against coronavirus-mediated diseases.

The FDA-approved drug Alectinib compromises SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid phosphorylation and inhibits viral infection in vitro.

While vaccines are vital for preventing COVID-19 infections, it is critical to develop new therapies to treat patients who become infected. Pharmacological targeting of a host factor required for viral replication can suppress viral spread with a low probability of viral mutation leading to resistance. In particular, host kinases are highly druggable targets and a number of conserved coronavirus proteins, notably the nucleoprotein (N), require phosphorylation for full functionality. In order to understand how targeting kinases could be used to compromise viral replication, we used a combination of phosphoproteomics and bioinformatics as well as genetic and pharmacological kinase inhibition to define the enzymes important for SARS-CoV-2 N protein phosphorylation and viral replication. From these data, we propose a model whereby SRPK1/2 initiates phosphorylation of the N protein, which primes for further phosphorylation by GSK-3a/b and CK1 to achieve extensive phosphorylation of the N protein SR-rich domain. Importantly, we were able to leverage our data to identify an FDA-approved kinase inhibitor, Alectinib, that suppresses N phosphorylation by SRPK1/2 and limits SARS-CoV-2 replication. Together, these data suggest that repurposing or developing novel host-kinase directed therapies may be an efficacious strategy to prevent or treat COVID-19 and other coronavirus-mediated diseases.

Systematic analysis of the intersection of disease mutations with protein modifications.

BACKGROUND: Perturbed posttranslational modification (PTM) landscapes commonly cause pathological phenotypes. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project profiles thousands of tumors allowing the identification of spontaneous cancer-driving mutations, while Uniprot and dbSNP manage genetic disease-associated variants in the human population. PhosphoSitePlus (PSP) is the most comprehensive resource for studying experimentally observed PTM sites and the only repository with daily updates on functional annotations for many of these sites. To elucidate altered PTM landscapes on a large scale, we integrated disease-associated mutations from TCGA, Uniprot, and dbSNP with PTM sites from PhosphoSitePlus. We characterized each dataset individually, compared somatic with germline mutations, and analyzed PTM sites intersecting directly with disease variants. To assess the impact of mutations in the flanking regions of phosphosites, we developed DeltaScansite, a pipeline that compares Scansite predictions on wild type versus mutated sequences. Disease mutations are also visualized in PhosphoSitePlus. RESULTS: Characterization of somatic variants revealed oncoprotein-like mutation profiles of U2AF1, PGM5, and several other proteins, showing alteration patterns similar to germline mutations. The union of all datasets uncovered previously unknown losses and gains of PTM events in diseases unevenly distributed across different PTM types. Focusing on phosphorylation, our DeltaScansite workflow predicted perturbed signaling networks consistent with calculations by the machine learning method MIMP. CONCLUSIONS: We discovered oncoprotein-like profiles in TCGA and mutations that presumably modify protein function by impacting PTM sites directly or by rewiring upstream regulation. The resulting datasets are enriched with functional annotations from PhosphoSitePlus and present a unique resource for potential biomarkers or disease drivers.

15 years of PhosphoSitePlus®: integrating post-translationally modified sites, disease variants and isoforms.

For 15 years the mission of PhosphoSitePlus® (PSP, https://www.phosphosite.org) has been to provide comprehensive information and tools for the study of mammalian post-translational modifications (PTMs). The number of unique PTMs in PSP is now more than 450 000 from over 22 000 articles and thousands of MS datasets. The most important areas of growth in PSP are in disease and isoform informatics. Germline mutations associated with inherited diseases and somatic cancer mutations have been added to the database and can now be viewed along with PTMs and associated quantitative information on novel 'lollipop' plots. These plots enable researchers to interactively visualize the overlap between disease variants and PTMs, and to identify mutations that may alter phenotypes by rewiring signaling networks. We are expanding the sequence space to include over 30 000 human and mouse isoforms to enable researchers to explore the important but understudied biology of isoforms. This represents a necessary expansion of sequence space to accommodate the growing precision and depth of coverage enabled by ongoing advances in mass spectrometry. Isoforms are aligned using a new algorithm. Exploring the worlds of PTMs and disease mutations in the entire isoform space will hopefully lead to new biomarkers, therapeutic targets, and insights into isoform biology.

Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assays.

This unit describes six different ELISA systems for the detection of specific antibodies, soluble antigens, or cell-surface antigens. In all six systems, soluble reactants are removed from solution after specifically binding to solid-phase reactants. In the first four protocols, solid-phase reactants are prepared by adsorbing an antigen or antibody onto plastic microtiter plates; in the next two protocols, the solid-phase reactants are cell-associated molecules. In all protocols, the solid-phase reagents are incubated with secondary or tertiary reactants covalently coupled to an enzyme. Unbound conjugates are washed out and a chromogenic or fluorogenic substrate is added. As the substrate is hydrolyzed by the bound enzyme conjugate, a colored or fluorescent product is generated. Finally, the product is detected visually or with a microtiter plate reader. The amount of product generated is proportional to the amount of analysate in the test mixture. One of the support protocols can be used to optimize the different ELISAs. A second support protocol presents a method for preparing alkaline phosphatase conjugates.

PhosphoSitePlus, 2014: mutations, PTMs and recalibrations.

PhosphoSitePlus(®) (PSP, http://www.phosphosite.org/), a knowledgebase dedicated to mammalian post-translational modifications (PTMs), contains over 330,000 non-redundant PTMs, including phospho, acetyl, ubiquityl and methyl groups. Over 95% of the sites are from mass spectrometry (MS) experiments. In order to improve data reliability, early MS data have been reanalyzed, applying a common standard of analysis across over 1,000,000 spectra. Site assignments with P > 0.05 were filtered out. Two new downloads are available from PSP. The 'Regulatory sites' dataset includes curated information about modification sites that regulate downstream cellular processes, molecular functions and protein-protein interactions. The 'PTMVar' dataset, an intersect of missense mutations and PTMs from PSP, identifies over 25,000 PTMVars (PTMs Impacted by Variants) that can rewire signaling pathways. The PTMVar data include missense mutations from UniPROTKB, TCGA and other sources that cause over 2000 diseases or syndromes (MIM) and polymorphisms, or are associated with hundreds of cancers. PTMVars include 18 548 phosphorlyation sites, 3412 ubiquitylation sites, 2316 acetylation sites, 685 methylation sites and 245 succinylation sites.

Signatures of natural selection on mutations of residues with multiple posttranslational modifications.

Posttranslational modifications (PTMs) regulate molecular structures and functions of proteins by covalently binding to amino acids. Hundreds of thousands of PTMs have been reported for the human proteome, with multiple PTMs known to affect tens of thousands of lysine (K) residues. Our molecular evolutionary analyses show that K residues with multiple PTMs exhibit greater conservation than those with a single PTM, but the difference is rather small. In contrast, short-term evolutionary trends revealed in an analysis of human population variation exhibited a much larger difference. Lysine residues with three PTMs show 1.8-fold enrichment of Mendelian disease-associated variants when compared with K residues with two PTMs, with the latter showing 1.7-fold enrichment of these variants when compared with the K residues with one PTM. Rare polymorphisms in humans show a similar trend, which suggests much greater negative selection against mutations of K residues with multiple PTMs within population. Conversely, common polymorphisms are overabundant at unmodified K residues and at K residues with fewer PTMs. The observed difference between inter- and intraspecies patterns of purifying selection on residues with PTMs suggests extensive species-specific drifting of PTM positions. These results suggest that the functionality of a protein is likely conserved, without necessarily conserving the PTM positions over evolutionary time.

PhosphoSitePlus: a comprehensive resource for investigating the structure and function of experimentally determined post-translational modifications in man and mouse.

PhosphoSitePlus (http://www.phosphosite.org) is an open, comprehensive, manually curated and interactive resource for studying experimentally observed post-translational modifications, primarily of human and mouse proteins. It encompasses 1,30,000 non-redundant modification sites, primarily phosphorylation, ubiquitinylation and acetylation. The interface is designed for clarity and ease of navigation. From the home page, users can launch simple or complex searches and browse high-throughput data sets by disease, tissue or cell line. Searches can be restricted by specific treatments, protein types, domains, cellular components, disease, cell types, cell lines, tissue and sequences or motifs. A few clicks of the mouse will take users to substrate pages or protein pages with sites, sequences, domain diagrams and molecular visualization of side-chains known to be modified; to site pages with information about how the modified site relates to the functions of specific proteins and cellular processes and to curated information pages summarizing the details from one record. PyMOL and Chimera scripts that colorize reactive groups on residues that are modified can be downloaded. Features designed to facilitate proteomic analyses include downloads of modification sites, kinase-substrate data sets, sequence logo generators, a Cytoscape plugin and BioPAX download to enable pathway visualization of the kinase-substrate interactions in PhosphoSitePlus®.

PhosphoSite: A bioinformatics resource dedicated to physiological protein phosphorylation.

PhosphoSite is a curated, web-based bioinformatics resource dedicated to physiologic sites of protein phosphorylation in human and mouse. PhosphoSite is populated with information derived from published literature as well as high-throughput discovery programs. PhosphoSite provides information about the phosphorylated residue and its surrounding sequence, orthologous sites in other species, location of the site within known domains and motifs, and relevant literature references. Links are also provided to a number of external resources for protein sequences, structure, post-translational modifications and signaling pathways, as well as sources of phospho-specific antibodies and probes. As the amount of information in the underlying knowledgebase expands, users will be able to systematically search for the kinases, phosphatases, ligands, treatments, and receptors that have been shown to regulate the phosphorylation status of the sites, and pathways in which the phosphorylation sites function. As it develops into a comprehensive resource of known in vivo phosphorylation sites, we expect that PhosphoSite will be a valuable tool for researchers seeking to understand the role of intracellular signaling pathways in a wide variety of biological processes.

Phosphoprotein analysis using antibodies broadly reactive against phosphorylated motifs.

The substrates of most protein kinases remain unknown because of the difficulty tracing signaling pathways and identifying sites of protein phosphorylation. Here we describe a method useful in detecting subclasses of protein kinase substrates. Although the method is broadly applicable to any protein kinase for which a substrate consensus motif has been identified, we illustrate here the use of antibodies broadly reactive against phosphorylated Ser/Thr-motifs typical of AGC kinase substrates. Phosphopeptide libraries with fixed residues corresponding to consensus motifs RXRXXT*/S* (Akt motif) and S*XR (protein kinase C motif) were used as antigens to generate antibodies that recognize many different phosphoproteins containing the fixed motif. Because most AGC kinase members are phosphorylated and activated by phosphoinositide-dependent protein kinase-1 (PDK1), we used PDK1-/- ES cells to profile potential AGC kinase substrates downstream of PDK1. To identify phosphoproteins detected using the Akt substrate antibody, we characterized the antibody binding specificity to generate a specificity matrix useful in predicting antibody reactivity. Using this approach we predicted and then identified a 30-kDa phosphoprotein detected by both Akt and protein kinase C substrate antibodies as S6 ribosomal protein. Phosphospecific motif antibodies offer a new approach to protein kinase substrate identification that combines immunoreactivity data with protein data base searches based upon antibody specificity.