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“The small ubiquitin-related modifier (SUMO) is a small group of proteins that are reversibly attached to protein substrates to modify their functions. The large scale identification of protein SUMOylation and their modification sites in mammalian cells represents a significant challenge because of the relatively small number of in vivo substrates and the dynamic nature of this modification. We report here a novel proteomics approach to selectively enrich and identify

SUMO conjugates from human cells. We stably expressed different SUMO paralogs in HEK293 cells, each containing a His 6 tag and a strategically located tryptic cleavage site at the C terminus to facilitate the recovery and identification of SUMOylated peptides by affinity enrichment and mass spectrometry. Tryptic peptides with short SUMO remnants offer significant advantages in large scale SUMOylome experiments including the generation of paralog-specific

PF-562271 in vivo fragment ions following CID and ETD activation, and the identification of modified peptides using conventional database search engines such as Mascot. We identified 205 unique protein substrates together with 17 precise SUMOylation sites present in 12 SUMO protein conjugates including three new sites (Lys-380, Lys-400, and Lys-497) on the protein promyelocytic leukemia. Label-free quantitative proteomics analyses on purified nuclear extracts from untreated and arsenic trioxide-treated cells revealed that all identified SUMOylated sites of promyelocytic leukemia were differentially SUMOylated upon stimulation. Molecular & Cellular Proteomics 10: 10.1074/mcp.M110.004796, 1-15, Selleck Cilengitide 2011.”
“Many recombinant eukaryotic proteins tend to form insoluble aggregates called inclusion bodies, especially when expressed in Escherichia coli. We report the first application of the technique of three-phase partitioning (TPP) to obtain correctly refolded active proteins from solubilized inclusion bodies. TPP was used for refolding

12 different proteins overexpressed in E. coli. In each case, the protein refolded by TPP gave either higher refolding Dibutyryl-cAMP mouse yield than the earlier reported method or succeeded where earlier efforts have failed. TPP-refolded proteins were characterized and compared to conventionally purified proteins in terms of their spectral characteristics and/or biological activity. The methodology is scaleable and parallelizable and does not require subsequent concentration steps. This approach may serve as a useful complement to existing refolding strategies of diverse proteins from inclusion bodies.”
“The prognosis of esophageal cancer (EC) remains poor, lymph node metastasis is one of the most important factors for determining the prognosis of patients with EC. Extensive lymph node dissection has long been considered as the favorable procedure to achieve an accurate pathologic staging and a better prognosis.