Unrestrictive identification of post-translational modifications in the urine proteome without enrichment

Background Research on the human urine proteome may lay the foundation for the discovery of relevant disease biomarkers. Post-translational modifications (PTMs) have important effects on the functions of protein biomarkers. Identifying PTMs without enrichment adds no extra steps to conventional identification procedures for urine proteomics. The only difference is that this method requires software that can conduct unrestrictive identifications of PTMs. In this study, routine urine proteomics techniques were used to identify urine proteins. Unspecified PTMs were searched by MODa and PEAKS 6 automated software, followed by a manual search to screen out in vivo PTMs by removing all in vitro PTMs and amino acid substitutions. Results There were 75 peptides with 6 in vivo PTMs that were found by both MODa and PEAKS 6. Of these, 34 peptides in 18 proteins have novel in vivo PTMs compared with the annotation information of these proteins on the Universal Protein Resource website. These new in vivo PTMs had undergone methylation, dehydration, oxidation, hydroxylation, phosphorylation, or dihydroxylation. Conclusions In this study, we identified PTMs of urine proteins without the need for enrichment. Our investigation may provide a useful reference for biomarker discovery in the future.