Protein Abundance Changes and Ubiquitylation Targets Identified after Inhibition of the Proteasome with Syringolin A

As proteins are the main effectors inside cells, their levels need to be tightly regulated. This is partly achieved by specific protein degradation via the Ubiquitin-26S proteasome system (UPS). In plants, an exceptionally high number of proteins are involved in Ubiquitin-26S proteasome system-mediated protein degradation and it is known to regulate most, if not all, important cellular processes. Here, we investigated the response to the inhibition of the proteasome at the protein level treating leaves with the specific inhibitor Syringolin A (SylA) in a daytime specific manner and found 109 accumulated and 140 decreased proteins. The patterns of protein level changes indicate that the accumulating proteins cause proteotoxic stress that triggers various responses. Comparing protein level changes in SylA treated with those in a transgenic line over-expressing a mutated ubiquitin unable to form polyubiquitylated proteins produced little overlap pointing to different response pathways. To distinguish between direct and indirect targets of the UPS we also enriched and identified ubiquitylated proteins after inhibition of the proteasome, revealing a total of 1791 ubiquitylated proteins in leaves and roots and 1209 that were uniquely identified in our study. The comparison of the ubiquitylated proteins with those changing in abundance after SylA-mediated inhibition of the proteasome confirmed the complexity of the response and revealed that some proteins are regulated both at transcriptional and post-transcriptional level. For the ubiquitylated proteins that accumulate in the cytoplasm but are targeted to the plastid or the mitochondrion, we often found peptides in their target sequences, demonstrating that the UPS is involved in controlling organellar protein levels. Attempts to identify the sites of ubiquitylation revealed that the specific properties of this post-translational modification can lead to incorrect peptide spectrum assignments in complex peptide mixtures in which only a small fraction of peptides is expected to carry the ubiquitin footprint. This was confirmed with measurements of synthetically produced peptides and calculating the similarities between the different spectra.