Investigation and identification of functional post-translational modification sites associated with drug binding and protein-protein interactions.

Background: Protein post-translational modification (PTM) plays an essential role in various cellular processes that modulates the physical and chemical properties, folding, conformation, stability and activity of proteins, thereby modifying the functions of proteins. The improved throughput of mass spectrometry (MS) or MS/MS technology has not only brought about a surge in proteome-scale studies, but also contributed to a fruitful list of identified PTMs. However, with the increase in the number of identified PTMs, perhaps the more crucial question is what kind of biological mechanisms these PTMs are involved in. This is particularly important in light of the fact that most protein-based pharmaceuticals deliver their therapeutic effects through some form of PTM. Yet, our understanding is still limited with respect to the local effects and frequency of PTM sites near pharmaceutical binding sites and the interfaces of protein-protein interaction (PPI). Understanding PTM's function is critical to our ability to manipulate the biological mechanisms of protein.

Results: In this study, to understand the regulation of protein functions by PTMs, we mapped 25,835 PTM sites to proteins with available three-dimensional (3D) structural information in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), including 1785 modified PTM sites on the 3D structure. Based on the acquired structural PTM sites, we proposed to use five properties for the structural characterization of PTM substrate sites: the spatial composition of amino acids, residues and side-chain orientations surrounding the PTM substrate sites, as well as the secondary structure, division of acidity and alkaline residues, and solvent-accessible surface area. We further mapped the structural PTM sites to the structures of drug binding and PPI sites, identifying a total of 1917 PTM sites that may affect PPI and 3951 PTM sites associated with drug-target binding. An integrated analytical platform (CruxPTM), with a variety of methods and online molecular docking tools for exploring the structural characteristics of PTMs, is presented. In addition, all tertiary structures of PTM sites on proteins can be visualized using the JSmol program.

Conclusion: Resolving the function of PTM sites is important for understanding the role that proteins play in biological mechanisms. Our work attempted to delineate the structural correlation between PTM sites and PPI or drug-target binding. CurxPTM could help scientists narrow the scope of their PTM research and enhance the efficiency of PTM identification in the face of big proteome data. CruxPTM is now available at http://csb.cse.yzu.edu.tw/CruxPTM/ .