Mass spectrometry-based quantification of the cellular response to ultraviolet radiation in HeLa cells

Ultraviolet (UV) irradiation is a common form of DNA damage that can cause pyrimidine dimers between DNA, which can cause gene mutations, even double-strand breaks and threaten genome stability. If DNA repair systems default their roles at this stage, the organism can be damaged and result in disease, especially cancer. To better understand the cellular response to this form of damage, we applied highly sensitive mass spectrometry to perform comparative proteomics of phosphorylation in HeLa cells. A total of 4367 phosphorylation sites in 2100 proteins were identified, many of which had not been reported previously. Comprehensive bioinformatics analysis revealed that these proteins were involved in many important biological processes, including signaling, localization and cell cycle regulation. The nuclear pore complex, which is very important for RNA transport, was changed significantly at phosphorylation level, indicating its important role in response to UV-induced cellular stress. Protein–protein interaction network analysis and DNA repair pathways crosstalk were also examined in this study. Proteins involved in base excision repair, nucleotide repair and mismatch repair changed their phosphorylation pattern in response to UV treatment, indicating the complexity of cellular events and the coordination of these pathways. These systematic analyses provided new clues of protein phosphorylation in response to specific DNA damage, which is very important for further investigation. And give macroscopic view on an overall phosphorylation situation under UV radiation.