Spatial and Temporal Effects in Protein Post-translational
Modification Distributions in the Developing Mouse Brain
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Abstract
Protein post-translational modification
(PTM) is a powerful way
to modify the behavior of cellular proteins and thereby cellular behavior.
Multiple recent studies of evolutionary trends have shown that certain
pairs of protein post-translational modifications tend to occur closer
to each other than expected at random. This type of observation may
form the basis of a proposed “PTM code”, whereby protein
function is controlled by complex patterns of multiple PTMs. This
code could provide an additional, powerful level of regulatory control
for protein function and is a plausible explanation for observations
of increasingly frequent and diverse protein modification in cell
biology. In this study, we use mass spectrometry and proteomic strategies
to present biological data showing spatiotemporal PTM co-localization
across multiple PTM categories, which display changes over development
of the brain. This may be an indication of the existence of a PTM-based
functional coding mechanism, which would significantly expand our
view of the ways in which cells use protein PTMs in complex signaling
networks