2013, Niewiadomski, Pawel, Kong, Jennifer H., Ahrends, Robert, Ma, Yan, Humke, Eric W., Khan, Sohini, Teruel, Mary N., Novitch, Bennett G., Rohatgi, Rajat

Gli proteins are transcriptional effectors of the Hedgehog (Hh) pathway in both normal development and cancer. We describe a program of multisite phosphorylation that regulates the conversion of Gli proteins into transcriptional activators. In the absence of Hh ligands, Gli activity is restrained by the direct phosphorylation of six conserved serine residues by protein kinase A (PKA), a master negative regulator of the Hh pathway. Activation of signaling leads to a global remodeling of the Gli phosphorylation landscape: the PKA target sites become dephosphorylated, while a second cluster of sites undergoes phosphorylation. The pattern of Gli phosphorylation can regulate Gli transcriptional activity in a graded fashion, suggesting a phosphorylation-based mechanism for how a gradient of Hh signaling in a morphogenetic field can be converted into a gradient of transcriptional activity.

2015, Ota, Asuka, Kovary, Kyle M., Wu, Olivia H., Ahrends, Robert, Shen, Wen-Jun, Costa, Maria J., Feldman, Brian J., Kraemer, Fredric B., Teruel, Mary N.

Insulin resistance (IR) underlies metabolic disease. Visceral, but not subcutaneous, white adipose tissue (WAT) has been linked to the development of IR, potentially due to differences in regulatory protein abundance. Here we investigate how protein levels are changed in IR in different WAT depots by developing a targeted proteomics approach to quantitatively compare the abundance of 42 nuclear proteins in subcutaneous and visceral WAT from a commonly used insulin-resistant mouse model, Lepr(db/db), and from C57BL/6J control mice. The most differentially expressed proteins were important in adipogenesis, as confirmed by siRNA-mediated depletion experiments, suggesting a defect in adipogenesis in visceral, but not subcutaneous, insulin-resistant WAT. Furthermore, differentiation of visceral, but not subcutaneous, insulin-resistant stromal vascular cells (SVCs) was impaired. In an in vitro approach to understand the cause of this impaired differentiation, we compared insulin-resistant visceral SVCs to preadipocyte cell culture models made insulin resistant by different stimuli. The insulin-resistant visceral SVC protein abundance profile correlated most with preadipocyte cell culture cells treated with both palmitate and TNFα. Together, our study introduces a method to simultaneously measure and quantitatively compare nuclear protein expression patterns in primary adipose tissue and adipocyte cell cultures, which we show can reveal relationships between differentiation and disease states of different adipocyte tissue types.

2014, Khor, Victor K., Ahrends, Robert, Lin, Ye, Shen, Wen-Jun, Adams, Christopher M., Roseman, Ann Nomoto, Cortez, Yuan, Teruel, Mary N., Azhar, Salman, Kraemer, Fredric B.

Within cells, lipids are stored in the form of lipid droplets (LDs), consisting of a neutral lipid core, surrounded by a phospholipid monolayer and an outer layer of protein. LDs typically accumulate either triacylglycerol (TAG) and diacylglycerol or cholesteryl ester (CE), depending on the type of tissue. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the proteins that surround LDs. LD proteins have been found to be quite diverse, from structural proteins to metabolic enzymes, proteins involved in vesicular transport, and proteins that may play a role in LD formation. Previous proteomics analyses have focused on TAG-enriched LDs, whereas CE-enriched LDs have been largely ignored. Our study has compared the LD proteins from CE-enriched LDs to TAG-enriched LDs in steroidogenic cells. In primary rat granulosa cells loaded with either HDL to produce CE-enriched LDs or fatty acids to produce TAG-enriched LDs, 61 proteins were found to be elevated in CE-enriched LDs and 40 proteins elevated in TAG-enriched LDs with 278 proteins in similar amounts. Protein expression was further validated by selected reaction monitoring (SRM) mass spectrometry (MS). SRM verified expression of 25 of 27 peptides that were previously detected by tandem mass tagging MS. Several proteins were confirmed to be elevated in CE-enriched LDs by SRM including the intermediate filament vimentin. This study is the first to compare the proteins found on CE-enriched LDs with TAG-enriched LDs and constitutes the first step in creating a better understanding of the proteins found on CE-enriched LDs in steroidogenic cells.