Cell-specific bioorthogonal tagging of glycoproteins.

Altered glycoprotein expression is an undisputed corollary of cancer development. Understanding these alterations is paramount but hampered by limitations underlying cellular model systems. For instance, the intricate interactions between tumour and host cannot be adequately recapitulated in monoculture of tumour-derived cell lines. More complex co-culture models usually rely on sorting procedures for proteome analyses and rarely capture the details of protein glycosylation. Here, we report a strategy termed Bio-Orthogonal Cell line-specific Tagging of Glycoproteins (BOCTAG). Cells are equipped by transfection with an artificial biosynthetic pathway that transforms bioorthogonally tagged sugars into the corresponding nucleotide-sugars. Only transfected cells incorporate bioorthogonal tags into glycoproteins in the presence of non-transfected cells. We employ BOCTAG as an imaging technique and to annotate cell-specific glycosylation sites in mass spectrometry-glycoproteomics. We demonstrate application in co-culture and mouse models, allowing for profiling of the glycoproteome as an important modulator of cellular function.

Inhibition of TOR in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii Leads to Rapid Cysteine Oxidation Reflecting Sustained Physiological Changes.

The target of rapamycin (TOR) kinase is a master metabolic regulator with roles in nutritional sensing, protein translation, and autophagy. In Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a unicellular green alga, TOR has been linked to the regulation of increased triacylglycerol (TAG) accumulation, suggesting that TOR or a downstream target(s) is responsible for the elusive "lipid switch" in control of increasing TAG accumulation under nutrient limitation. However, while TOR has been well characterized in mammalian systems, it is still poorly understood in photosynthetic systems, and little work has been done to show the role of oxidative signaling in TOR regulation. In this study, the TOR inhibitor AZD8055 was used to relate reversible thiol oxidation to the physiological changes seen under TOR inhibition, including increased TAG content. Using oxidized cysteine resin-assisted capture enrichment coupled with label-free quantitative proteomics, 401 proteins were determined to have significant changes in oxidation following TOR inhibition. These oxidative changes mirrored characterized physiological modifications, supporting the role of reversible thiol oxidation in TOR regulation of TAG production, protein translation, carbohydrate catabolism, and photosynthesis through the use of reversible thiol oxidation. The delineation of redox-controlled proteins under TOR inhibition provides a framework for further characterization of the TOR pathway in photosynthetic eukaryotes.