Posttranslational modifications examples

Posttranslational modification Examples of posttranslational modification POSTTRANSLATIONAL MODIFICATION OF POLYPEPTIDE CHAINS (p. 440) Many polypeptide chains are covalently modified after translation. Such modifications include trimming excess amino acids, phosphorylation which may activate or inactivate the protein, glycosylation which targets a protein to become part of a plasma membrane or lysosome or be secreted from the cell, or hydroxylation such as that seen in collagen. 

In the x-ray structure of rhodopsin, an amphipathic helix runs parallel to the membrane from the intracellular end of TM-VII beneath the seven-helical bundle to the other side of TM-I and TM-II. At this point, one or more Cys residues are often found and are known to be subject to a dynamic posttranslational modification with palmitic acid residues. Like the phosphorylation event, the palmitoylation process appears to be dynamically regulated by receptor occupancy and is also involved in the desensitization phenomenon. The two posttranslational modifications can influence each other. For example, the conformational constraint induced by palmitoylation may alter the accessibility of certain phosphorylation sites. Like the phosphorylation process, the functional consequences of palmitoylation also appear to vary from receptor to receptor. 

The combination of this top-down proteomics approach, which generates information on the structure of the intact protein, with a bottom-up approach for protein identification (using MS/MS data of tryptic peptides from the collected fractions) has been particularly useful for identifying posttranslational modifications, cotransla-tional processing, and proteolytic modifications in a number of proteins. Examples from our work will be shown to illustrate this hybrid methodology for proteomics analysis. 

Prenylation of proteins (a posttranslational modification) that need to be held in the cell membrane by a lipid tail. An example is the p21 G protein in the insulin and growth factor pathways. 

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