PNNL

Abstract

Protein tyrosine phosphorylation is a central regulatory mechanism in cell signaling. To extensively characterize the site-specific tyrosine phosphorylation in human cells, we present here a global survey of tyrosine phosphorylation sites in a normal-derived human mammary epithelial cell (HMEC) line by applying anti-phosphotyrosine (pTyr) peptide immunoaffinity purification (IP) coupled with high sensitivity LC-MS/MS. A total of 481 tyrosine phosphorylation sites (covered by 716 unique peptides) from 285 proteins were confidently identified in HMEC following the analysis of both the basal condition and an acute stimulated condition with epidermal growth factor (EGF). The estimated false discovery rate is 1.0% as measured by comparison against a scrambled database search. Comparison of these data to the literature showed significant agreement in site matches. Additionally 281 sites were not previously observed in HMEC culture were found. Twenty-nine of these sites have not been reported in any human cell or tissue system. The global profiling also allowed us to examine the phosphorylation stoichiometry differences based on spectral count information. Comparison of the data to a previous global proteome profiling study illustrates that most of the highly phoshorylated proteins are of relatively low-abundance. Large differences in phosphorylation stoichiometry for sites within the same protein were also observed for many of the identified proteins, suggesting potentially more important functional roles for those highly phosphorylated pTyr sites within a given protein. By mapping to major signaling networks such as EGF receptor and insulin growth factor-1 receptor signaling pathways, many known proteins involved in these pathways were revealed to be tyrosine phosphorylated, which should allow us to select interesting targeted involved in a given pathway for more directed studies. This extensive HMEC tyrosine phosphorylation dataset represents an important database resource for facilitating future hypothesis-driven or targeted quantitative studies involving tyrosine phosphorylation in HMEC or other human systems.