Proteomic analysis and prediction of human phosphorylation sites in subcellular level reveal subcellular specificity

Protein phosphorylation is the most common post-translational modification (PTM) regulating major cellular processes through highly dynamic and complex signaling pathways. Large-scale comparative phosphoproteomic studies have frequently been done on whole cells or organs by conventional bottom-up mass spectrometry approaches, i.e at the phosphopeptide level. Using this approach, there is no way to know from where the phosphopeptide signal originated. Also, as a consequence of the scale of these studies, important information on the localization of phosphorylation sites in subcellular compartments (SCs) is not surveyed.

Here, we present a first account of the emerging field of subcellular phosphoproteomics where a support vector machine (SVM) approach was combined with a novel algorithm of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to facilitate the identification of compartment-specific phosphorylation sites and to unravel the intricate regulation of protein phosphorylation. Our data reveal that the subcellular phosphorylation distribution is compartment type dependent and that the phosphorylation displays site-specific sequence motifs that diverge between SCs.

The method and database both are available as a web server at: http://bioinfo.ncu.edu.cn/SubPhos.aspx.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.