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Published July 12, 2023 | Published
Journal Article Open

Pervasive SUMOylation of heterochromatin and piRNA pathway proteins

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

enome regulation involves complex protein interactions that are often mediated through post-translational modifications (PTMs). SUMOylation—modification by the small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO)—has been implicated in numerous essential processes in eukaryotes. In Drosophila, SUMO is required for viability and fertility, with its depletion from ovaries leading to heterochromatin loss and ectopic transposon and gene activation. Here, we developed a proteomics-based strategy to uncover the Drosophila ovarian "SUMOylome," which revealed that SUMOylation is widespread among proteins involved in heterochromatin regulation and different aspects of the Piwi-interacting small RNA (piRNA) pathway that represses transposons. Furthermore, we show that SUMOylation of several piRNA pathway proteins occurs in a Piwi-dependent manner. Together, these data highlight broad implications of protein SUMOylation in epigenetic regulation and indicate novel roles of this modification in the cellular defense against genomic parasites. Finally, this work provides a resource for the study of SUMOylation in other biological contexts in the Drosophila model.

Copyright and License

© 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Acknowledgement

We thank former Caltech Protein Exploration Laboratory (PEL) members Dr. Michael Sweredoski and Dr. Annie Moradian for their advice on diGly proteomics, and Corinne Karalun (former laboratory assistant in M.N. laboratory, UCR), Hannah Ryon (former rotation student in K.F.T. laboratory, Caltech), and Matea Ibrahim (undergraduate student at UC Riverside) for assistance with WB, fly dissections, fixation, and genotyping. This work was supported by grants from the NIH (K99/R00 HD099316) to M.N.; the NIH (R01 GM097363) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar Award to A.A.A.; and the NIH (R01 GM110217) and Ellison Medical Foundation Awards to K.F.T.

Contributions

M.N., K.F.T., and A.A.A. conceptualized the proteomics study. M.N. designed and performed experiments, data curation, and formal analysis, except LC-MS/MS runs and raw data processing, which were performed at the Caltech PEL facility by B.L. H.H. performed GFP-Aub localization experiments. M.N. prepared figures and drafted the manuscript. M.N. and A.A.A. edited the manuscript.

Data Availability

The mass spectrometry raw and processed data are deposited to the ProteomeXchange Consortium (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/) via the PRIDE repository with the dataset identifier PRIDE: PXD037421 and are publicly available as of the date of publication. All original code is available at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7834381.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Additional details

Created:
September 8, 2023
Modified:
June 18, 2024