CoA metabolite interactions, enabling the identification of biological processes susceptible to altered acetyl-CoA levels. Finally, we utilize systems-level analyses to assess the features of novel protein networks that may interact with acyl-CoAs and demonstrate a strategy for high-confidence annotation of direct acetyl-CoA binding proteins and AT enzymes in human proteomes. Overall our studies illustrate the power of integrating chemoproteomics and systems biology analysis methods and provide a novel resource for understanding the diverse signaling roles of acyl-CoAs in biology and disease.
Results
Validation of CATNIP for the global study of acyl-CoA/protein interactionsIn order to deeply sample acyl-CoA/protein interactions on a proteome-wide scale, we initially set out to integrate CoA-based protein capture methods with LC-MS/MS ( Fig. 2a). In this workflow, whole cell extracts are first incubated with Lys-CoA Sepharose. This affinity matrix enables active site-dependent enrichment of many different classes of CoA-binding proteins, 8 making it ideal for broad profiling studies. Next, enriched proteins are subjected to tryptic digest and analyzed using MudPIT (multidimensional protein identification technology), a proteomics platform that combines strong cation exchange and C18 reverse phase chromatography to pre-fractionate tryptic peptides, followed by ionization and data-dependent MS/MS. 9 The separation afforded by this approach significantly decreases sample complexity, allowing the identification of rare, low abundance peptides from complex proteomic mixtures. To facilitate the identification of acyl-CoA/protein interactions, competition experiments are performed in which proteomes are pre-incubated with a CoA metabolite prior to capture. 10 Decreased enrichment in competition samples compared to controls (as assessed by quantitative spectral counting) signifies that the CoA metabolite interacts with a protein of interest.These interacting proteins can then be further classified into pharmacological or biological networks using either conventional metrics (fold-change, gene ontology, etc) or systems-based analysis tools.As an initial model, we explored the utility of CATNIP to globally profile acetyl-CoA/protein interactions in unfractionated HeLa cell proteomes. Proteomes were pre-incubated with acetyl-CoA or vehicle (buffer) control, followed by enrichment using Lys-CoA Sepharose. These experiments assessed competition at 3, 30, and 300 µM acetyl-CoA, which spans the physiological concentration range of acetyl-CoA in the cytosol and mitochondria. Protein capture in each condition was quantified using distributed normalized spectral abundance factor (dNSAF), a label-free metric that normalizes spectral counts relative to overall protein length ( Fig. S1a-c , Table S1). 11 Each condition was analyzed in triplicate, constituting 12 experiments, >144 hours of instrument time, and over 1.1 million non-redundant peptide spectra collected. We limited our analysis to highconfidence protein identifications (>4...