Exploring the context of diacidic motif DE as a signal for unconventional protein secretion in eukaryotic proteins

Unconventional protein secretion (UPS) is an important phenomenon with fundamental implications to cargo export. How eukaryotic proteins transported by UPS are recognized without a conventional signal peptide has been an open question. It was recently observed that a diacidic amino acid motif (ASP-GLU or DE) is necessary for the secretion of superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) from yeast under nutrient starvation. Taking cue from this discovery, we explore the hypothesis of whether the diacidic motif DE, which can occur fairly ubiquitously, along with its context, can be a generic signal for unconventional secretion of proteins. Four different contexts were evaluated: a physical context encompassing the structural order and charge signature in the neighbourhood of DE, two signalling contexts reflecting the presence of either a phosphorylatable amino acid ('X' in XDE, DXE, DEX) or an LC3 interacting region (LIR) which can trigger autophagy and a co-evolutionary constraint relative to other amino acids in the protein interpreted by examining sequences across different species. Among the 100 proteins we curated from different physiological or pathological conditions, we observe a pattern in the unconventional secretion of heat shock proteins in the cancer secretome, where DE in an ordered structural region has higher odds of being a UPS signal.