Evaluation of <i>Drosophila</i> Metabolic Labeling Strategies for <i>in Vivo</i> Quantitative Proteomic Analyses with Applications to Early Pupa Formation and Amino Acid Starvation

Abstract

Although stable isotope labeling by amino acids in cell culture (SILAC)-based quantitative proteomics was first developed as a cell culture-based technique, stable isotope-labeled amino acids have since been successfully introduced <i>in vivo</i> into select multicellular model organisms by manipulating the feeding diets. An earlier study by others has demonstrated that heavy lysine labeled <i>Drosophila melanogaster</i> can be derived by feeding with an exclusive heavy lysine labeled yeast diet. In this work, we have further evaluated the use of heavy lysine and/or arginine for metabolic labeling of fruit flies, with an aim to determine its respective quantification accuracy and versatility. <i>In vivo</i> conversion of heavy lysine and/or heavy arginine to several nonessential amino acids was observed in labeled flies, leading to distorted isotope pattern and underestimated heavy to light ratio. These quantification defects can nonetheless be rectified at protein level using the normalization function. The only caveat is that such a normalization strategy may not be suitable for every biological application, particularly when modified peptides need to be individually quantified at peptide level. In such cases, we showed that peptide ratios calculated from the summed intensities of all isotope peaks are less affected by the heavy amino acid conversion and therefore less sequence-dependent and more reliable. Applying either the single Lys8 or double Lys6/Arg10 metabolic labeling strategy to flies, we quantitatively mapped the proteomic changes during the onset of metamorphosis and upon amino acid deprivation. The expression of a number of steroid hormone 20-hydroxyecdysone regulated proteins was found to be changed significantly during larval–pupa transition, while several subunits of the V-ATPase complex and components regulating actomyosin were up-regulated under starvation-induced autophagy conditions