Quantitative phosphoproteomics-based molecular network description for high-resolution kinase-substrate interactome analysis

Motivation: Phosphorylation-dependent cellular signaling is known to play a diverse role in regulating multiple cellular processes such as proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis. Recent technological advances in mass spectrometry-based phosphoproteomics have enabled us to measure network-wide signaling dynamics in a comprehensive and quantitative manner. As conventional protein-protein interaction (PPI) information-based network analysis is insufficient to systematically analyze phosphorylation site-dependent complex interaction dynamics, here we develop and evaluate a platform to provide a high-resolution molecular network description for kinase- substrate interactome analysis. Results: In this study, we developed a Cytoscape-based bioinformatical platform named 'Post Translational Modification mapper (PTMapper)' to integrate PPI data with publicly available kinase-substrate relations at the resolution of phosphorylated amino acid residues. The previous phosphoproteome data on EGF-induced cellular signaling in glioblastoma stem cells was applied to evaluate our platform, leading to discovery of phosphorylation-dependent crucial signaling modulation in the p70S6K1-related pathway. Our study revealed that high-resolution cellular network description of phosphorylation-site dependent kinase-substrate signaling regulation should accelerate phosphoproteomics-based exploration of novel drug targets in the context of each disease-related signaling. Availability and Implementation: PTMapper and the example data for construction of phosphorylation site-oriented networks are available at https://github.com/y-narushima/PTMapper.