Threonine residues chemical modification

The second method also relies on site-specific chemical modification ofphosphoproteins (Oda et al., 2001). It involves the chemical replacement of phosphates on serine and threonine residues with a biotin affinity tag (Fig. 2.7B). The replacement reaction takes advantage of the fact that the phosphate moiety on phosphoserine and phosphothreonine undergoes -elimination under alkaline conditions to form a group that reacts with nucleophiles such as ethanedithiol. The resulting free sulfydryls can then be coupled to biotin to create the affinity tag (Oda et al., 2001). The biotin tag is used to purify the proteins subsequent to proteolytic digestion. The biotinylated peptides are isolated by an additional affinity purification step and are then analyzed by mass spectrometry (Oda et al., 2001). This method was also tested with phosphorylated (Teasein and shown to efficiently enrich phosphopeptides. In addition, the method was used on a crude protein lysate from yeast and phosphorylated ovalbumin was detected. Thus, as with the method of Zhou et al. (2001), additional fractionation steps will be required to detect low abundance phosphoproteins. 

Hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine occur most noticeably in collagen. These are formed by modification of proline and lysine residues by specific enzymes after synthesis of the collagen chains. It is interesting to note that proly/hydroxylase, which hydroxylates proline, requires ascorbate (vitamin C) as a coreactant. Other chemical modifications known to occur commonly are the attachment of sugars (glycosylation) to asparagine, serine, and threonine residues and the phosphorylation of serine. Chemical modifications are also associated with the transport of proteins out of the cells in which they are synthesized. 

Reversible phosphorylation of proteins on serine, threonine and tyrosine residues by protein kinases and phosphatases represents the principal mechanism of signal transduction events that control a multitude of cellular processes (see ref. 1 and 2 for detained reviews). Phosphorylation is a posttranslational chemical modification that is used by prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells to define the properties of a large... 

Other PTMs may involve changes in the chemical nature of amino acids (e.g., citrullination or deimination). Because many of these modifications result in mass changes that are measurable by MS, they are amenable to detection by MS-based approaches. A number of emerging MS-based strategies allow the identification of PTMs. Several MS-based methods to determine the types and sites of protein phosphorylation and ubiquitination have been developed. Phosphorylation occurs mainly on serine, threonine, and tyrosine residues at a frequency ratio of 1800 200 1 in vertebrates.70 Although the phosphorylation of tyrosine residues occurs less frequently in the proteome, it has been extensively studied. 

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