In this work, we proposed a biosensor for trypsin proteolytic activity assay using immobilization of model peptides on screen-printed electrodes (SPE) modified with gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) prepared by electrosynthetic method. Sensing of proteolytic activity was based on electrochemical oxidation of tyrosine residues of peptides. We designed peptides containing N-terminal cysteine residue for immobilization on an SPE, modified with gold nanoparticles, trypsin-specific cleavage site and tyrosine residue as a redox label. The peptides were immobilized on SPE by formation of chemical bonds between mercapto groups of the N-terminal cysteine residues and AuNPs. After the incubation with trypsin, time-dependent cleavage of the immobilized peptides was observed by decline in tyrosine electrochemical oxidation signal. The kinetic parameters of trypsin, such as the catalytic constant (kcat), the Michaelis constant (KM) and the catalytic efficiency (kcat/KM), toward the CGGGRYR peptide were determined as 0.33 ± 0.01 min-1, 198 ± 24 nM and 0.0016 min-1 nM-1, respectively. Using the developed biosensor, we demonstrated the possibility of analysis of trypsin specificity toward the peptides with amino acid residues disrupting proteolysis. Further, we designed the peptides with proline or glutamic acid residues after the cleavage site (CGGRPYR and CGGREYR), and trypsin had reduced activity toward both of them according to the existing knowledge of the enzyme specificity. The developed biosensor system allows one to perform a comparative analysis of the protease steady-state kinetic parameters and specificity toward model peptides with different amino acid sequences.
The proteogenomic search pipeline developed in this work has been applied for reanalysis of 40 publicly available shotgun proteomic datasets from various human tissues comprising more than 8000 individual LC-MS/MS runs, of which 5442 .raw data files were processed in total. This reanalysis was focused on searching for ADAR-mediated RNA editing events, their clustering across samples of different origins, and classification. In total, 33 recoded protein sites were identified in 21 datasets. Of those, 18 sites were detected in at least two datasets, representing the core human protein editome. In agreement with prior artworks, neural and cancer tissues were found to be enriched with recoded proteins. Quantitative analysis indicated that recoding the rate of specific sites did not directly depend on the levels of ADAR enzymes or targeted proteins themselves, rather it was governed by differential and yet undescribed regulation of interaction of enzymes with mRNA. Nine recoding sites conservative between humans and rodents were validated by targeted proteomics using stable isotope standards in the murine brain cortex and cerebellum, and an additional one was validated in human cerebrospinal fluid. In addition to previous data of the same type from cancer proteomes, we provide a comprehensive catalog of recoding events caused by ADAR RNA editing in the human proteome.