A Chemoenzymatic Method Based on Easily Accessible Enzymes for Profiling Protein O‑GlcNAcylation

O-GlcNAcylation has gradually been recognized as a critically important protein post-translational modification in mammalian cells. Besides regulation of gene expression, its crosstalk with protein phosphorylation is vital for cell signaling. Despite its importance, comprehensive analysis of O-GlcNAcylation is extraordinarily challenging due to the low abundances of many O-GlcNAcylated proteins and the complexity of biological samples. Here, we developed a novel chemoenzymatic method based on a wild-type galactosyltransferase and uridine diphosphate galactose (UDP-Gal) for global and site-specific analysis of protein O-GlcNAcylation. This method integrates enzymatic reactions and hydrazide chemistry to enrich O-GlcNAcylated peptides. All reagents used are more easily accessible and cost-effective as compared to the engineered enzyme and click chemistry reagents. Biological triplicate experiments were performed to validate the effectiveness and the reproducibility of this method, and the results are comparable with the previous chemoenzymatic method using the engineered enzyme and click chemistry. Moreover, because of the promiscuity of the galactosyltransferase, 18 unique O-glucosylated peptides were identified on the EGF domain from nine proteins. Considering that effective and approachable methods are critical to advance glycoscience research, the current method without any sample restrictions can be widely applied for global analysis of protein O-GlcNAcylation in different samples.