Chemistry-based functional proteomics to identify novel deubiquitylating enzymes involved in viral infection

Ubiquitylation is a reversible post-translational modification pathway that regulates a variety of cellular processes including protein degradation and trafficking, intracellular localization, DNA repair, immune response and cellcycle progression. Deubiquitylating enzymes (DUBs) can remove the ubiquitin from the modified proteins and reverse the ubiquitylation-induced biological processes; hence it isn't hard to understand that viral pathogens take advantage of the host cell ubiquitin system through disturbing DUBs, for infection and replication. Although accumulated virus-related DUBs have been defined, but how viruses regulate their expression and activities is poor understand because of limitation of technologies. Recently, chemistry-based functional proteomics, which can not only monitor the alteration of abundance but also changes in activity of enzymes, was used to study the function of DUBs involved in virus infection and held much promise. Theses works suggest that chemistry-based functional proteomics is a potent strategy for high throughput screening of virus-related DUBs and exploring their roles in virus infection.