Protein O-GlcNAcylation plays extremely
important
roles in mammalian cells, regulating signal transduction and gene
expression. This modification can happen during protein translation,
and systematic and site-specific analysis of protein co-translational O-GlcNAcylation can advance our understanding of this important
modification. However, it is extraordinarily challenging because normally O-GlcNAcylated proteins are very low abundant and the abundances
of co-translational ones are even much lower. Here, we developed a
method integrating selective enrichment, a boosting approach, and
multiplexed proteomics to globally and site-specifically characterize
protein co-translational O-GlcNAcylation. The boosting
approach using the TMT labeling dramatically enhances the detection
of co-translational glycopeptides with low abundance when enriched O-GlcNAcylated peptides from cells with a much longer labeling
time was used as a boosting sample. More than 180 co-translational O-GlcNAcylated proteins were site-specifically identified.
Further analyses revealed that among co-translational glycoproteins,
those related to DNA binding and transcription are highly overrepresented
using the total identified O-GlcNAcylated proteins
in the same cells as the background. Compared with the glycosylation
sites on all glycoproteins, co-translational sites have different
local structures and adjacent amino acid residues. Overall, an integrative
method was developed to identify protein co-translational O-GlcNAcylation, which is very useful to advance our understanding
of this important modification.