Systematic analysis of the ubiquitome in mouse testis

A growing body of evidence now supports the fact that protein ubiquitination is an important modification during the regulation of spermatogenesis. However, little is known about the ubiquitome of the testis. In this study, we created a large-scale mouse testis ubiquitome profile using di-glycine remnant antibodies and mass spectrometry and identified a total of 14,219 ubiquitination sites in 4217 proteins. Bioinformatics and phenotypic analyses showed that the ubiquitinated proteins were closely related to meiosis and spermiogenesis. And 512 ubiquitination regulatory enzymes were identified in testis that can exert regulatory functions over ubiquitination: the homologous to E6AP C-terminus (HECT) and multi-subunit RING-finger type E3 ligases were significantly enriched. In addition, we identified 22 new ubiquitination sites on testicular histones and 146 ubiquitinated epigenetic factors, thus demonstrating that ubiquitination plays an important role in epigenetic regulation. Collectively, this in-depth characterization of the ubiquitome in mouse testis could provide a rich resource for further studies of regulatory events at the protein level during spermatogenesis. All MS data are available via ProteomeXchange with the identifier PXD025866.