Deep proteome coverage based on ribosome profiling aids MS-based protein and peptide discovery and provides evidence of alternative translation products and near-cognate translation initiation events.

An increasing number of studies involve integrative analysis of gene and protein expression data, taking advantage of new technologies such as next-generation transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) and highly sensitive mass spectrometry (MS) instrumentation. Recently, a strategy, termed ribosome profiling (or RIBO-seq), based on deep sequencing of ribosome-protected mRNA fragments, indirectly monitoring protein synthesis, has been described. We devised a proteogenomic approach constructing a custom protein sequence search space, built from both SwissProt and RIBO-seq derived translation products, applicable for MS/MS spectrum identification. To record the impact of using the constructed deep proteome database we performed two alternative MS-based proteomic strategies: (I) a regular shotgun proteomic and (II) an N-terminal COFRADIC approach. While the former technique gives an overall assessment on the protein and peptide level, the latter technique, specifically enabling the isolation of N-terminal peptides, is very appropriate in validating the RIBO-seq derived (alternative) translation initiation site profile. We demonstrate that this proteogenomic approach increases the overall protein identification rate with 2.5% (e.g. new protein products, new protein splice variants, SNP variant proteins, and N-terminally extended forms of known proteins) as compared to only searching UniProtKB-SwissProt. Furthermore, using this custom database, identification of N-terminal COFRADIC data resulted in detection of 16 alternative start sites giving rise to N-terminally extended protein variants besides the identification of four translated uORFs. Notably, the characterization of these new translation products revealed the use of multiple near-cognate (non-AUG) start codons. As deep sequencing techniques are becoming more standard, less expensive, and widespread, we anticipate that mRNA-seq and especially custom-tailored RIBO-seq will become indispensible in the MS-based protein or peptide identification process.