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INNOVATIVE METHODOLOGY
Division of Endocrinology, Endocrine Research Unit, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota
Submitted 14 July 2008 ; accepted in final form 27 August 2008
| ABSTRACT |
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protein synthesis; two-dimensional gel electrophoresis
Large-scale approaches for identification and relative quantification of proteins are a rapidly expanding field in biological research (11, 35), but the present quantitative proteomic approaches lack sufficient precision to measure changes in protein concentrations during a short experimental period, especially for proteins such as myosin heavy chain (MHC) with a very low fractional synthesis rate of <1.5% per day in human skeletal muscle. These approaches also have limitations in measuring the concentration changes in low-abundance proteins with a rapid turnover rate (34). Moreover, protein concentration is determined by the net effect of synthesis and degradation and does not offer any understanding on the regulatory pathways. To understand the regulation of translation of transcripts into proteins, it is important to measure the rate at which individual proteins are synthesized.
Proteomic strategies using in vivo isotope labeling have been developed for the relative measurement of protein turnover in cultures of single-cell organisms such as yeast (38) and bacteria (9) as well as in chickens (13). However, these approaches require a high isotopic enrichment of proteins that can only be achieved in single-cell organisms over a multiple number of generations or by feeding animals with highly enriched isotopes for a longer period. None of the above approaches is a direct measurement of the synthesis rate of proteins or practical in human studies. Most recently, a method has been reported to measure synthesis and degradation rate of β-amyloid in human cerebrospinal fluid by stable isotope-labeled amino acid incorporation and tandem mass spectrometry (MS) quantitation (SILT) (5). This method requires quantification of at least one specific peptide with an isotope-labeled amino acid. Although very promising, turnover measurement of multiple proteins by this method is yet to be reported.
Relative protein concentrations of several skeletal muscle mitochondrial proteins have been shown to decline with age (46). The reduction in the concentrations of these individual mitochondrial proteins, in turn, may occur because of a reduction in the synthesis rate of these muscle mitochondrial proteins as reported with aging (20, 40) or because of an increase in degradation of these proteins. The previously reported measurement of mitochondrial protein synthesis rate (13) is an estimation of average synthesis rate of all proteins in the muscle mitochondrial fraction, which may also contain proteins from myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic fractions. As it has been shown in type 2 diabetes, changes in gene transcripts in insulin-resistant type 2 diabetic patients do not involve all genes encoding mitochondrial proteins (1). It is also possible that the changes in translational rate are not global to all gene transcripts in specific physiological and pathological conditions. Measurement of synthesis rates of individual mitochondrial proteins is the only logical approach to assess translational rates of gene transcripts, but presently no methodology is available to measure the synthesis rates of individual mitochondrial proteins. We therefore sought to measure the synthesis rate of specific muscle mitochondrial proteins, and here we report a methodology to simultaneously measure the in vivo synthesis rates of multiple skeletal muscle mitochondrial proteins.
| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
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8 wk old and weighing 260–300 g were used for the study. Study protocol and procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and followed the guidelines of the National Research Council's Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Rats were housed individually in plastic boxes under a 12:12-h light-dark cycle with water and standard commercial rat chow. Study protocol. On the day of the study, rats were transferred to a smaller holding cage with light restraint to facilitate access to the tail. Each rat received an intravenous injection of [ring-13C6]phenylalanine (Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, Cambridge, MA; 99 atom percent excess, 10 mg/ml solution) at a dose of 15 mg/kg body wt (90.9 µmol/kg). An overdose of pentobarbital sodium (Nembutal, 50 mg/kg, intraperitoneal injection) was given 15 min after the tracer injection. At 20 min, individual hindlimb quadriceps muscles were rapidly removed under anesthesia. Muscle samples were blotted of blood, and any visible fat or connective tissue was removed. Samples were kept on ice in saline-soaked gauze for mitochondrial isolation. A small portion of the muscle sample was quickly frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at –80°C.
Purification of mitochondrial proteins.
Skeletal muscle mitochondria were initially separated using a differential centrifugation method (47), using
1 g of muscle tissue from each rat separately, and all individual samples were separately processed for protein purification. The mitochondrial pellets obtained were dissolved in 500 µl of lysis buffer (35 mM Tris, 9 M urea, 4% CHAPS, 65 mM DTT) and trace of bromophenol blue. The dissolved protein mixture was centrifuged at 14,000 rpm for 5 min to remove any undissolved material. Protein concentration was estimated by the Bradford method (Bio-Rad Laboratories, Hercules, CA). Individual proteins were isolated from the mixture by performing large, high-resolution, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DGE). Approximately 400 µg of each protein sample were dissolved in lysis buffer to a final volume of 900 µl. These samples were used to rehydrate 24-cm, pH 4–7 and 6–9, immobilized pH gradient (IPG) strips (Bio-Rad Laboratories, Hercules, CA) in a rehydration tray overnight. The rehydrated IPG strips were subjected to isoelectric focusing in a Protean IEF Cell (Bio-Rad) using a three-step protocol: 1) the focusing was achieved with an initial step of 250 V for 15 min, 2) continued with a maximum of 10,000 V increased linearly from 250 V over 6 h, and 3) continued at 10,000 V for 60,000 volt hours. The cell temperature was kept at 20°C with a maximum current of 50 µA/strip. The IPG strips were then equilibrated for the SDS-PAGE in a two-step equilibration using 5 ml of equilibration buffer per strip (6 M urea, 2% SDS, 0.375 M Tris·HCl, pH 8.8, and 20% glycerol) with 130 mM DTT in the first step and 135 mM iodoacetamide in the second step. The equilibration steps were done in an equilibration tray for 10 min each on a rotary shaker at room temperature. The second-dimension separation by subunit molecular weight was performed by vertical 12%, 24 x 20-cm dimension SDS-PAGE (Ettan DALT system; GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences, Piscataway, NJ). The IPG strips were mounted into the IPG well with molten agarose and then run at 75 V for 24 h or until the dye front reached the bottom of the gel. The protein gel spots were visualized by staining with Coomassie blue (GelCode Blue Stain Reagent; Pierce, Rockford, IL). Duplicate 2DGE was performed for both pH ranges of each sample to get enough protein from gel spots for further analysis. Pairs of 190 gel spots that were the most resolved and intense from both gels were excised and analyzed for protein identification by liquid chromatography-tandem MS (LC/MS/MS) and for isotopic enrichment by gas chromatography-quadrupole MS (GC/MS/MS). Although we used 1 g of muscle sample for the methodology development, for analysis, only 200 µg of protein were required for each gel and were obtained from a 100-mg muscle sample.
Protein identification by tandem MS. Gel spots were subjected to in-gel reduction and alkylation, followed by trypsin digestion, as previously described (24, 42). Peptides were extracted three times, first by adding 2% trifluoroacetyl acid (TFA) in water to the digest mixture and then by an equal volume of 60% acetonitrile-0.1% TFA-40% water followed by a final extraction with 100% acetonitrile. Extracts were dried in a SpeedVac to remove organic solvent. Samples were dissolved in 0.1% formic acid-2% acetonitrile solution just before injection into the mass spectrometer.
MS analyses were done on a quadrupole linear trap mass spectrometer (LTQ, Thermo Electron). The digested peptides were introduced into the LTQ through an automated nanoscale LC system (LC Packings, Dionex). The chromatographic separation was performed on a 100-µm inside diameter (ID) by 15-cm C18 column (Zorbax, Agilent Technologies), with a linear gradient elution from 100% buffer A (0.1% formic acid-acetonitrile, 98:2 vol/vol) to 60% buffer B (0.1% formic acid-acetonitrile, 2:98 vol/vol) in 60 min. The MS/MS raw data were converted to DTA files using ThermoElectron Bioworks 3.2 and correlated to theoretical fragmentation patterns of tryptic peptide sequences from a rat subset of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) nonredundant (December 2003) database using TurboSEQUEST (14) (version 27, revision 12; ThermoElectron, San Jose, CA) in Bioworks 3.2. The rat database contained 27,365 entries. All searches were conducted with cysteine modifications of +57 for carboxamidomethyl-cysteines and modifications allowing +16 with methionines for methionine sulfoxide. The search was restricted to trypsin-generated peptides, allowing for two missed cleavages from rat protein entries. Peptide mass search tolerance was set to 1.5 Da, and fragment mass tolerance was set to ±1.0 Da. Protein identifications were considered when at least two unique consensus peptides with individual cross correlations (xCorr) exceeded a set threshold depending on the precursor charge state (+1 xCorr >1.8, +2 xCorr >2.3, +3 xCorr >2.8), thus ranking as the hit for that MS/MS spectra. These thresholds correctly identified 50 fmol of the myoglobin standard (in similar matrix as the samples) as the only protein.
Isotopic enrichment of individual muscle proteins derived from gel spots.
For GC/MS/MS analysis, duplicate gels were run for each of six rat samples. Gel spots were washed several times with deionized water and then hydrolyzed overnight at 110°C in 6 M HCl. The amino acids from the hydrolyzed gel pieces were purified over an AG-50W cation exchange column. They were then eluted with 4 M NH4OH and dried down in the SpeedVac. The amino acid residues were derivatized to their N-heptafluorobutyryl methyl esters (15) and analyzed by tandem MS using a ThermoFinnigan TSQ 7000 GC/MS/MS under negative ion chemical ionization conditions, using isobutane as the reactant gas. The derivatives were dissolved in ethyl acetate and separated on a 30 m x 0.25 mm ID x 0.25 µm RTX-1701 fused silica column (Restek, Bellefonte, PA), using splitless injection (2 µl). The 13C enrichment of [ring-13C6]phenylalanine was measured by MS/MS by monitoring transition fragments of the [M-HF]– parent ions corresponding to the [m+2] and [m+6] species using transitions m/z [357
306] and m/z [361
290], respectively. The technique of measuring the ratio of [m+6] to [m+2] instead of [m+6] to [m+0] for determination of low levels of enrichment (<0.5%) on a conventional organic mass spectrometer has been described by Calder et al. (8) and Slater et al. (49).
Isotopic enrichment of free phenylalanine in muscle tissue fluid. Tissue fluid amino acids were extracted from muscle tissue of each rat using perchloric acid as described (6) and analyzed as their t-butyldimethylsilyl ester derivative (45). The molar percent excess of [13C6]phenylalanine was calculated above background as previously described (22).
Fractional synthesis rate of skeletal muscle proteins. The fractional synthesis rate (FSR) for individual proteins for all six rats was calculated from the isotopic enrichment of [13C6]phenylalanine (Ie) in the proteins and using the tissue fluid free phenylalanine enrichment (Pe) as the precursor pool. The equation used is as previously described (55): FSR (%/h) = [Ie/(Pe * t)] * 100, where t represents time (0.33 h).
Pathway analysis and grouping of proteins. Eighty-two identified proteins were used as "focus proteins" in Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA; Ingenuity Systems, Redwood City, CA). All proteins in the Ingenuity Protein Knowledge Base (PKB) database were used as reference. Eighty-two proteins were identified using GenBank Identification (GI) numbers. The corresponding gene symbols for each GI number were obtained using IPA's GI-gene symbol matching tool. The functional annotations for each gene symbol, "biological process" and "cellular component" of Gene Ontology, protein name, and pathways, were obtained using NetAffx (http://www.affymetrix.com/analysis/index.affx; Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA).
Statistical analyses. All values are expressed as means ± SE. Unpaired t-test was used for detecting differences in fractional synthesis rates between individual proteins or between protein groups.
| RESULTS |
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| DISCUSSION |
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The approach described in the present paper offers many advantages. Most of the recent developments in quantitative proteomics have focused on improving the technology for measuring protein abundance, which is the net result of protein synthesis and breakdown. Protein abundance data, in the absence of protein turnover information, can overlook several proteins that are affected by a particular biological condition, because the turnover rate of a protein can be altered by a condition without any change in protein concentration. For example, a simultaneous increase in synthesis rate and breakdown of a protein results in no changes in concentration, although substantial changes in biological functions may occur. Moreover, as discussed in the INTRODUCTION, the presently available quantitative proteomic approaches do not have sufficient precision to detect changes in low-abundance proteins, including many enzymes that have major biological functions (34), and short-term studies are unlikely to detect changes in concentrations of proteins that turn over slowly. The present approach circumvents these problems by measuring the in vivo synthesis rate of proteins, although no information on protein degradation is available. In some cases, simultaneous measurements of synthesis rate and concentration of a protein at baseline and following intervention offer qualitative measurement of degradation rate.
There are many logistical reasons to recommend the present approach. One of the main limitations of performing proteomic studies in humans is the limitation of the size of tissue samples. The MS/MS approach we have used relies on purifying proteins from a fraction or compartment of interest and requires as little as 1 µg or less of each individual protein for the measurement. There exists well-established stable isotope tracer methods for measuring the synthesis of total muscle proteins (33) and muscle protein fractions including sarcoplasmic (3) and mitochondrial proteins (3, 40, 41). The average synthesis rates of mitochondrial, sarcoplasmic, and myofibrillar proteins in the present study (Fig. 4) agree with the previously reported average synthesis rates. The main advantage of the present method is that it measures synthesis rates of highly purified individual mitochondrial proteins unlike the average FSR of mixed muscle proteins or different subcellular fractions that were previously reported. Moreover, the proteins of mitochondrial fractions prepared by differential centrifugation have in the present study been shown to be contaminated with proteins from the other compartments such as myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic protein fractions. If the contributions of myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic components to mitochondrial fractions isolated by differential centrifugation are stable under different study conditions, it is potentially feasible to estimate fractional synthesis rates of mixed mitochondrial proteins.
In general, the previous methods measure the abundance of isotopic enrichment in muscle proteins by using GC-combustion-isotope ratio MS (GC/C/IRMS) of the derivatized amino acids from the hydrolysis of proteins. Such approaches are sensitive and accurate but also limited, since they require relatively large amounts of protein. However, the GC/C/IRMS approach is not sensitive for isotopic enrichment measurement of individual proteins obtained from a 2DGE, as in the present study, because of the limitation of very small sample size. It is possible to purify sufficient quantities of the individual muscle contractile proteins such as MHC by preparative continuous elution gel electrophoresis (2), or MHC and actin by SDS-PAGE (23). However, these are relatively high-abundance proteins in muscle, and
0.3–1.0 mg of purified protein is required to be able to measure isotopic enrichment by GC/C/IRMS. Moreover, it is not realistic to use these methods to purify multiple individual muscle proteins for isotopic enrichment measurement. By combining 2DGE for protein purification and GC/MS/MS to measure isotopic enrichment in the present study, we were able to calculate the FSR of multiple individual muscle proteins simultaneously.
We chose to focus on the mitochondrial cellular fraction from rat skeletal muscle for this study, mainly because of substantial interest in mitochondrial changes as a potential mechanism in aging (46) and many other metabolic conditions (31, 50, 51). The exact number of mitochondrial proteins is not known but is believed to be
1,000 proteins (43). Most of the proteomic analyses performed to date have identified mitochondrial proteins using high-throughput experiments. For example, Gaucher et al. (19) mapped 680 proteins associated with human heart mitochondria (19) from three separate studies using high-throughput proteomics (19, 53, 54). A report of proteomic analyses in combination with RNA expression data produced a list of 591 mitochondrial proteins using mouse brain, heart, kidney, and liver (30), while another study identified 689 mitochondrial proteins using rat liver, heart, and skeletal muscle (16). Although the above studies have attempted only to identify or profile mitochondrial proteins, there have also been reports to purify individual mitochondrial proteins from various organs, but not skeletal muscle. A study using the human neuroblastoma cell line SH-SY5Y isolated and identified 60 mitochondrial proteins by 2DGE (44), and another two studies using rat liver produced 80 (17) and 78 (29) mitochondrial proteins by 2DGE. The present study, to the best of our knowledge, is the first study reporting large-scale purification of skeletal muscle mitochondrial proteins by 2DGE. Of the 91 individual muscle proteins, only 68 (73.9%) were mitochondrial proteins, indicating that the muscle mitochondrial fraction obtained through differential centrifugation does not entirely consist of mitochondrial proteins. These proteins are synthesized in cytoplasmic compartments and transported into mitochondria. There are about 13 mitochondrial proteins encoded by mitochondrial genes that were not purified in the present approach. Although we used two different pH ranges and a very-large-size (24 x 24 cm) 2DGE to achieve superior resolving ability for purification, the present approach was not ideal to purify many membrane proteins. The present approach also did not isolate many hydrophobic proteins in mitochondria that can be purified by using an alternative electrophoretic approach.
The present study reports synthesis rates of only nuclear-encoded proteins in mitochondria. 2DGE has its own limitations, such as its inability to detect very-low-abundance or extremely small proteins (21), a lower yield in the isolation of number of proteins, and its inability to separate hydrophobic proteins (19). However, we chose to use 2DGE-based protein purification in the present study because it offered the ability to visually select a large number of proteins that are purified and resolved on a single platform. Another potential limitation in this study is that the application of tracer infusion is delivered as a single-bolus intravenous injection instead of a continuous steady-state infusion. Nevertheless, our technique could be easily applied to measure the synthesis rate of multiple proteins in steady-state tracer infusion studies as well. For fractional protein synthesis rate calculations, we used isotopic enrichment in muscle tissue fluid, which consists of
85% intracellular and 15% extracellular fluid and offers the best approximation to amino acyl tRNA (28). Ideally, amino acyl tRNA enrichment representing the obligatory precursor of protein synthesis should be used for calculations of fractional protein synthesis rate. Although calculations using amino acid enrichment in tissue fluid as the precursor underestimate the fractional protein synthesis rates, intervention studies have shown that calculations based on both tissue fluid and plasma enrichment demonstrate similar directional changes as those measured using amino acyl tRNA (10, 12). Measurement of amino acyl tRNA is not practical in most studies because of the sample size required (
300- to 500-mg muscle sample). Because, in the present study, we used the same precursor pool for fractional protein synthesis rate measurements of all individual proteins, the relationship between synthesis rates of different proteins would not be altered even if we used amino acyl tRNA as precursor.
Of interest is the finding from the present study that the synthesis rates of skeletal muscle proteins vary substantially. Our results demonstrate a fivefold range between the lowest and the highest FSR values among the mitochondrial proteins. However, the FSR among all the proteins analyzed spans a 10-fold range, demonstrating the lowest rates for MHC, which is a structural protein, and the highest for dihydrolipoamide branched chain transacylase E2, which is a mitochondrial protein. As indicated in the RESULTS, we could not find any differences in average synthesis rates of proteins clustered based on different functions or based on anatomic locations within mitochondria. For example, we did not observe any difference in the FSR between membrane vs. nonmembrane proteins or for proteins classified within the five functional groups of the citric acid cycle, electron transport chain, fatty acid metabolism, glycolysis and gluconeogenesis, and amino acid metabolism. A potential explanation for this is that the study was conducted in normal healthy animals under baseline conditions and also because of the lack of coverage of all the known muscle proteins. However, a key finding was that individual proteins within a functional group have vastly different synthesis rates. For example, 3-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase type II (FSR = 0.34 ± 0.08%/h) and short chain acetyl CoA (FSR = 0.88 ± 0.23%/h) are involved in mitochondrial fatty acid metabolism but have significantly (P = 0.04) different synthesis rates. Even with the single respiratory enzyme complex cytochrome c oxidase, we found that the FSR of individual subunits VIa (FSR = 1.13 ± 0.42%/h) and Vb (FSR = 0.37 ± 0.05%/h) varied threefold (P = 0.04). There are many other examples to show the wide range in synthesis rates of proteins with similar functions (Table 1 and Supplemental Table; supplemental data are available at the online version of this article). No clear explanation for this novel observation is evident from the present study. For mitochondrial function, it is important to have a complement of all proteins in each protein complex, and the differences in the synthesis rates of proteins with similar function may be an unappreciated step in functional regulation. It remains to be determined whether these vastly different protein synthesis rates remain similar under conditions of changing fuel oxidation.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating the synthesis rate of multiple muscle proteins from animals or humans. Although we did not isolate and analyze all of the known muscle proteins, our results demonstrate a significant difference in the FSR between the contractile proteins and the mitochondrial and sarcoplasmic proteins. This is very important, because, although we prepared purified mitochondrial fractions through centrifugation, the mitochondrial pellet still contained numerous proteins from the sarcoplasmic and structural compartments of muscle. This fact should not be overlooked while measuring the synthesis rate of total proteins from various fractions of skeletal muscle, as happens in most studies. During stable isotope labeling, all proteins being synthesized are labeled simultaneously, which offers the possibility of measuring synthesis rates of multiple proteins from the sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar fractions from the same muscle sample, which contain more sarcoplasmic proteins and structural proteins, respectively. In addition, the present methodology could be easily adapted to measure synthesis rates of multiple proteins from any other organ tissue or biological fluid.
The FSR measurement of individual proteins represents the best measurement of translational rate of gene transcripts and thus offers a potential opportunity to understand in vivo regulation of specific genes. The present approach measures the dynamics of gene expression at the translational level and offers an opportunity to understand the regulation of gene expression in a new dimension. Quantification of the abundance of gene transcripts and proteins provides a valuable measure of steady-state net changes in transcript and protein turnover rates. However, when used in combination with protein translational rates, substantial opportunities are available to understand the pathophysiology of many clinical conditions involving muscle mitochondrial dysfunction.
| GRANTS |
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| FOOTNOTES |
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The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. The article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
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