Mass Spectrometric Identification of In Vivo Phosphorylation Sites of Differentially Expressed Proteins in Elongating Cotton Fiber Cells

Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE)-based proteomics approach was applied to extensively explore the molecular basis of plant development and environmental adaptation. These proteomics analyses revealed thousands of differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) closely related to different biological processes. However, little attention has been paid to how peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) data generated by the approach can be directly utilized for the determination of protein phosphorylation. Here, we used the software tool FindMod to predict the peptides that might carry the phosphorylation modification by examining their PMF data for mass differences between the empirical and theoretical peptides and then identified phosphorylation sites using MALDI TOF/TOF according to predicted peptide data from these DEP spots in the 2-D gels. As a result, a total of 48 phosphorylation sites of 40 DEPs were successfully identified among 235 known DEPs previously revealed in the 2-D gels of elongating cotton fiber cells. The 40 phosphorylated DEPs, including important enzymes such as enolase, transketolase and UDP-L-rhamnose synthase, are presumed to participate in the functional regulation of numerous metabolic pathways, suggesting the reverse phosphorylation of these proteins might play important roles in elongating cotton fibers. The results also indicated that some different isoforms of the identical DEP revealed in our 2-DE-based proteomics analysis could be annotated by phosphorylation events. Taken together, as the first report of large-scale identification of phosphorylation sites in elongating cotton fiber cells, our study provides not only an excellent example of directly identifying phosphorylation sites from known DEPs on 2-D gels but also provides a valuable resource for future functional studies of phosphorylated proteins in this field.