Cooperativity within proximal phosphorylation sites is revealed from large-scale proteomics data

Regev Schweiger, Michal Linial

Phosphorylation is the most prevalent post-translational modification on eukaryotic proteins. Multisite phosphorylation enables a specific combination of phosphosites to determine the speed, specificity and duration of biological response. Until recent years, the lack of high quality data limited the possibility for analyzing the properties of phosphorylation at the proteome scale and in the context of a wide range of conditions. Thanks to advances of mass spectrometry technologies, thousands of phosphosites from in-vivo experiments were identified and archived in the public domain. Such resource is appropriate to derive an unbiased view on the phosphosites properties in eukaryotes and on their functional relevance.