Comparative Large Scale Characterization of Plant versus Mammal Proteins Reveals Similar and Idiosyncratic N-α-Acetylation Features

N-terminal modifications play a major role in the fate of proteins in terms of activity, stability, or subcellular compartmentalization. Such modifications remain poorly described and badly characterized in proteomic studies, and only a few comparison studies among organisms have been made available so far. Recent advances in the field now allow the enrichment and selection of N-terminal peptides in the course of proteome-wide mass spectrometry analyses. These targeted approaches unravel as a result the extent and nature of the protein N-terminal modifications. Here, we aimed at studying such modifications in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to compare these results with those obtained from a human sample analyzed in parallel. We applied large scale analysis to compile robust conclusions on both data sets. Our data show strong convergence of the characterized modifications especially for protein N-terminal methionine excision, co-translational N-alpha-acetylation, or N-myristoylation between animal and plant kingdoms. Because of the convergence of both the substrates and the N-alpha-acetylation machinery, it was possible to identify the N-acetyltransferases involved in such modifications for a small number of model plants. Finally, a high proportion of nuclear-encoded chloroplast proteins feature post-translational N-alpha-acetylation of the mature protein after removal of the transit peptide. Unlike animals, plants feature in a dedicated pathway for post-translational acetylation of organelle-targeted proteins. The corresponding machinery is yet to be discovered. Molecular & Cellular Proteomics 11: 10.1074/mcp.M111.015131, 1-14, 2012.