Approaches to determine protein ubiquitination residue types

Abstract

Ubiquitination is an important posttranslational modification in eukaryotic organisms and plays a central role in many signaling pathways in plants. Most ubiquitination typically occurs on substrate lysine residues, forming a covalent isopeptide bond. Some recent reports suggested ubiquitin can be attached to nonlysine sites such as serine/threonine, cysteine or the N-terminal methionine, via oxyester or thioester linkages, respectively. In the present protocol, we developed a convenient in vitro assay for investigating ubiquitination on Ser/Thr and Cys residues.