Comparative proteomic and transcriptomic profiling of the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe

The fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe is a widely used model organism to study basic mechanisms of eukaryotic biology, but unlike other model organisms, its proteome remains largely uncharacterized. Using a shotgun proteomics approach based on multidimensional prefractionation and tandem mass spectrometry, we have detected ∼30% of the theoretical fission yeast proteome. Applying statistical modelling to normalize spectral counts to the number of predicted tryptic peptides, we have performed label-free quantification of 1465 proteins. The fission yeast protein data showed considerable correlations with mRNA levels and with the abundance of orthologous proteins in budding yeast. Functional pathway analysis indicated that the mRNA–protein correlation is strong for proteins involved in signalling and metabolic processes, but increasingly discordant for components of protein complexes, which clustered in groups with similar mRNA–protein ratios. Self-organizing map clustering of large-scale protein and mRNA data from fission and budding yeast revealed coordinate but not always concordant expression of components of functional pathways and protein complexes. This finding reaffirms at the protein level the considerable divergence in gene expression patterns of the two model organisms that was noticed in previous transcriptomic studies.