Global Profiling of Lysine Crotonylation in Vascular Smooth Muscle Cell Phenotypic Remodeling

Abstract Objective: Crotonylation of histones is a recently discovered type of post-translational modification that can regulate gene expression. However, the function of crotonylation on nonhistone proteins in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) is unclear. In this study, we aim to use modification and proteomic analysis to find the cellular characteristic of crotonylated nonhistone proteins for deep research.Methods: In this article, we performed modification and proteomic analysis of VSMCs before and after platelet-derived growth factor-BB (PDGF-BB) stimulation. The crotonylated pan-antibody was used to enrich the protein and then subjected to high-throughput mass spectrometry analysis. Results: As a result, there were 2138 crotonylation sites in 534 proteins. These proteins are widely distributed in the cytoplasm, nucleus, and mitochondria, and participate in the cell metabolism processes such as amino acid synthesis, glycolysis, and glycogen synthesis. Conclusions: In summary, our bioinformatics shows that nonhistone crotonylation plays an important role in the VSMC phenotypic transformation induced by PDGF-BB stimulation.