Quantitative Phosphoproteomics of Alzheimers Disease Reveals Crosstalk between Kinases and Small Heat Shock Proteins

摘要

Abnormal phosphorylation contributes to the formation of neurofibrillary tangles in Alzheimer Disease (AD), but may play other signaling roles during AD pathogenesis. In this study, we employed immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC) followed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry to identify phosphopeptides from 8 individual AD and 8 age-matched control postmortem human brain tissues. Using this approach, we identified 5,569 phosphopeptides in frontal cortex across all 16 cases in which phosphopeptides represented 80 percent of all peptide spectral counts collected following IMAC enrichment. Marker selection identified 253 significantly altered phosphopeptides by precursor intensity, changed by at least 1.75 fold relative to controls, with an empirical false discovery rate below 7 percent. Approximately 21 percent of all significantly altered phosphopeptides in AD tissue were derived from tau. Of the other 142 proteins hyperphosphorylated in AD, membrane, synapse, cell junction, and alternatively spliced proteins were overrepresented. Of these, we validated differential phosphorylation of heat-shock protein-beta-1 (HSPB1) and crystallin-alpha-B (CRYAB) as hyperphosphorylated by western blotting. We further identified a network of phosphorylated kinases, which co-enriched with phosphorylated small heat shock proteins. This supports a hypothesis that a number of kinases are regulating and/or regulated by the small heat shock protein folding network.