Integrating Phosphoproteomics and Bioinformatics to Study Brassinosteroid-Regulated Phosphorylation Dynamics in Arabidopsis

Background Protein phosphorylation regulated by plant hormone is involved in the coordination of fundamental plant development. Brassinosteroids (BRs), a group of phytohormones, regulated phosphorylation dynamics remains to be delineated in plants. In this study, we performed a mass spectrometry (MS)-based phosphoproteomics to conduct a global and dynamic phosphoproteome profiling across five time points of BR treatment in the period between 5 min and 12 h. MS coupling with phosphopeptide enrichment techniques has become the powerful tool for profiling protein phosphorylation. However, MS-based methods tend to have data consistency and coverage issues. To address these issues, bioinformatics approaches were used to complement the non-detected proteins and recover the dynamics of phosphorylation events.