Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Widespread K methylation in plasmodium -- and other things!


My Destroyer is getting set to reanalyze some old data while I'm out of the office today, thanks to this new paper.


In this, they do some really intense antibody-based pull-downs specifically looking for lysine methylations. And find them...all over...in Plasmodium falciparum. I'm always hunting for explanations for the spectra that we can never seem to explain from these organisms, and maybe some of them are thanks to methylations all over the place.  My first thought is throw in lysine methylation and just see -- then my next obvious thought is...is this inhibiting trypsin...?

So...in trying to hunt down some info on the topic...I find this paper...


...that strongly implies that maybe I ought to be doing meta-analyses on other proteomics datasets cause lysine methylations may be involved in all sorts of things outside of where we expect them to be (histones!)

One of the things that comes out of this Tuesday morning post-espresso paper binge is this fact: lysine methylation has been predicted the 4th most common PTM in nature? What?  Who decided that?!?

Turns out these guys did back in 2011!!


Check out this chart!! (Click to expand if you need to)


They looked at how often we observe PTMs compared to how often PTMs ought to occur. We know we're Phospho-biased, but it popping up as number 2 makes it seem like not such a bad bias. (I wonder how this chart looks now, considering how the glycoproteomics field has blown up the last few years?)

Does this post make any sense?  I know it lost linearity somewhere. What the frack is a geranylation?!?!?  I'd better hit the "Publish" button before this gets any more chaotic!

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