Enzyme-mediated damage repair or mitigation, while common for nucleic acids, is rare for proteins. Examples of protein damage are elimination of phosphorylated Ser/Thr to dehydroalanine/dehydrobutyrine (Dha/ Dhb) in pathogenesis and aging. Bacterial LanC enzymes use Dha/Dhb to form carbon-sulfur linkages in antimicrobial peptides, but the functions of eukaryotic LanC-like (LanCL) counterparts are unknown. We show that LanCLs catalyze the addition of glutathione to Dha/Dhb in proteins, driving irreversible C-glutathionylation. Chemo-enzymatic methods were developed to site-selectively incorporate Dha/Dhb at phospho-regulated sites in kinases. In human MAPK-MEK1, such ''elimination damage'' generated aberrantly activated kinases, which were deactivated by LanCL-mediated C-glutathionylation. Surveys of endogenous proteins bearing damage from elimination (the eliminylome) also suggest it is a source of electrophilic reactivity. LanCLs thus remove these reactive electrophiles and their potentially dysregulatory effects from the proteome. As knockout of LanCL in mice can result in premature death, repair of this kind of protein damage appears important physiologically. ll

Through a “tag-and-modify” protein chemical modification strategy, we site-selectively phosphorylated the activation loop of protein kinase p38α. Phosphorylation at natural (180) and unnatural (172) sites created two pure phospho-forms. p38α bearing only a single phosphocysteine (pCys) as a mimic of pThr at 180 was sufficient to switch the kinase to an active state, capable of processing natural protein substrate ATF2; 172 site phosphorylation did not. In this way, we chemically recapitulated triggering of a relevant segment of the MAPK-signaling pathway in vitro. This allowed detailed kinetic analysis of global and stoichiometric phosphorylation events catalyzed by p38α and revealed that site 180 is a sufficient activator alone and engenders dominant mono-phosphorylation activity. Moreover, a survey of kinase inhibition using inhibitors with different (Type I/II) modes (including therapeutically relevant) revealed unambiguously that Type II inhibitors inhibit phosphorylated p38α and allowed discovery of a predictive kinetic analysis based on cooperativity to distinguish Type I vs II.

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