SUMMARY Although most tissues in an organism are genetically identical, the biochemistry of each is optimized to fulfill its unique physiological roles, with important consequences for human health and disease. Each tissue’s unique physiology requires tightly regulated gene and protein expression coordinated by specialized, phosphorylation-dependent intracellular signaling. To better understand the role of phosphorylation in maintenance of physiological differences among tissues, we performed proteomic and phosphoproteomic characterizations of nine mouse tissues. We identified 12,039 proteins, including 6296 phosphoproteins harboring nearly 36,000 phosphorylation sites. Comparing protein abundances and phosphorylation levels revealed specialized, interconnected phosphorylation networks within each tissue while suggesting that many proteins are regulated by phosphorylation independently of their expression. Our data suggest that the ‘typical’ phosphoprotein is widely expressed, yet displays variable, often tissue-specific phosphorylation that tunes protein activity to the specific needs of each tissue. We offer this dataset as an online resource for the biological research community.

Data analysis and interpretation remain major logistical challenges when attempting to identify large numbers of protein phosphorylation sites by nanoscale reverse-phase liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) (Supplementary Figure 1 online). In this report we address challenges that are often only addressable by laborious manual validation, including data set error, data set sensitivity and phosphorylation site localization. We provide a large-scale phosphorylation data set with a measured error rate as determined by the target-decoy approach, we demonstrate an approach to maximize data set sensitivity by efficiently distracting incorrect peptide spectral matches (PSMs), and we present a probability-based score, the Ascore, that measures the probability of correct phosphorylation site localization based on the presence and intensity of site-determining ions in MS/MS spectra. We applied our methods in a fully automated fashion to nocodazole-arrested HeLa cell lysate where we identified 1,761 nonredundant phosphorylation sites from 491 proteins with a peptide false-positive rate of 1.3%.

The eukaryotic cell division cycle is characterized by a sequence of orderly and highly regulated events resulting in the duplication and separation of all cellular material into two newly formed daughter cells. Protein phosphorylation by cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) drives this cycle. To gain further insight into how phosphorylation regulates the cell cycle, we sought to identify proteins whose phosphorylation is cell cycle regulated. Using stable isotope labeling along with a two-step strategy for phosphopeptide enrichment and high mass accuracy mass spectrometry, we examined protein phosphorylation in a human cell line arrested in the G 1 and mitotic phases of the cell cycle. We report the identification of >14,000 different phosphorylation events, more than half of which, to our knowledge, have not been described in the literature, along with relative quantitative data for the majority of these sites. We observed >1,000 proteins with increased phosphorylation in mitosis including many known cell cycle regulators. The majority of sites on regulated phosphopeptides lie in [S/T]P motifs, the minimum required sequence for CDKs, suggesting that many of the proteins may be CDK substrates. Analysis of non-proline site-containing phosphopeptides identified two unique motifs that suggest there are at least two undiscovered mitotic kinases.cell cycle ͉ cyclin-dependent kinase ͉ mass spectrometry ͉ proteomics

Determining the site of a regulatory phosphorylation event is often essential for elucidating specific kinase-substrate relationships, providing a handle for understanding essential signaling pathways and ultimately allowing insights into numerous disease pathologies. Despite intense research efforts to elucidate mechanisms of protein phosphorylation regulation, efficient, large-scale identification and characterization of phosphorylation sites remains an unsolved problem. In this report we describe an application of existing technology for the isolation and identification of phosphorylation sites. By using a strategy based on strong cation exchange chromatography, phosphopeptides were enriched from the nuclear fraction of HeLa cell lysate. From 967 proteins, 2,002 phosphorylation sites were determined by tandem MS. This unprecedented large collection of sites permitted a detailed accounting of known and unknown kinase motifs and substrates.phosphorylation ͉ mass spectrometry ͉ strong cation exchange chromatography M uch of eukaryotic protein regulation occurs when protein kinases add a phosphate moiety in an ATP-dependent manner to a Ser, Thr, or Tyr residue of a substrate protein. Not surprisingly, malfunctions in this critical cellular process have been implicated as causal factors in diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. With Ͼ500 identified kinases and thousands of potential substrates, these proteins remain attractive drug targets. Large-scale identification of phosphorylated kinase substrates will certainly enhance our understanding of diverse biological phenomena, potentially leading to targeted intervention in any number of disease paradigms.The identification of phosphorylation sites is most robustly accomplished by MS (1, 2). With tandem MS (MS͞MS), phosphopeptides are fragmented to determine their sequence and to pinpoint the specific Ser, Thr, or Tyr modified by a protein kinase. Despite many reports of thousands of identified proteins from a single biological sample, the large-scale determination of phosphorylation sites is just emerging. To date, the three largest reported repositories of identified sites are from yeast and plant studies [383 (3),125 (4) and Ϸ200 (5)], whereas the most phosphorylation sites identified from a single human sample stands at 64 (6). Clearly, to study the rich biology relying on protein phosphorylation will require more effective methodologies.Uninformative fragmentation is a fundamental obstacle to phosphorylation site analysis, regardless of the scale of an experiment. Fragmentation of phosphopeptides by collision-induced dissociation by MS͞MS commonly results in the production of a single dominant peak corresponding to a neutral loss of phosphoric acid (H 3 PO 4 , 98 Da) from the phosphopeptide (for example, see Fig. 2B). The lack of informative fragmentation at the peptide backbone severely reduces the ability of database searching algorithms to unambiguously identify the phosphopeptide. Furthermore, when a phosphopeptide is identified, it is often ...