Frontiers in Chemistry (Nov 2022)

Enhanced protein–protein interaction network construction promoted by in vivo cross-linking with acid-cleavable click-chemistry enrichment

  • Lili Zhao,
  • Lili Zhao,
  • Bowen Zhong,
  • Yuxin An,
  • Yuxin An,
  • Weijie Zhang,
  • Weijie Zhang,
  • Hang Gao,
  • Hang Gao,
  • Xiaodan Zhang,
  • Zhen Liang,
  • Yukui Zhang,
  • Qun Zhao,
  • Lihua Zhang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fchem.2022.994572
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10

Abstract

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Chemical cross-linking coupled with mass spectrometry has emerged as a powerful strategy which enables global profiling of protein interactome with direct interaction interfaces in complex biological systems. The alkyne-tagged enrichable cross-linkers are preferred to improve the coverage of low-abundance cross-linked peptides, combined with click chemistry for biotin conjugation to allow the cross-linked peptide enrichment. However, a systematic evaluation on the efficiency of click approaches (protein-based or peptide-based) and diverse cleavable click-chemistry ligands (acid, reduction, and photo) for cross-linked peptide enrichment and release is lacking. Herein, together with in vivo chemical cross-linking by alkyne-tagged cross-linkers, we explored the click-chemistry-based enrichment approaches on protein and peptide levels with three cleavable click-chemistry ligands, respectively. By comparison, the approach of protein-based click-chemistry conjugation with acid-cleavable tags was demonstrated to permit the most cross-linked peptide identification. The advancement of this strategy enhanced the proteome-wide cross-linking analysis, constructing a 5,518-protein–protein-interaction network among 1,871 proteins with widely abundant distribution in cells. Therefore, all these results demonstrated the guideline value of our work for efficient cross-linked peptide enrichment, thus facilitating the in-depth profiling of protein interactome for functional analysis.

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