Quantitative proteomics reveals the temperature-dependent proteins encoded by a series of cluster genes in thermoanaerobacter tengcongensis.

Comprehensive and quantitative information of the thermophile proteome is an important source for understanding of the survival mechanism under high growth temperature. Thermoanaerobacter tengcongensis (T. tengcongensis), a typical anaerobic thermophilic eubacterium, was selected to quantitatively evaluate its protein abundance changes in response to four different temperatures. With optimized procedures of isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation quantitative proteomics (iTRAQ), such as peptide fractionation with high-pH reverse phase (RP) high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), tandem MS acquisition mode in LTQ Orbitrap Velos MS, and evaluation of the quantification algorithms, high quality of the quantitative information of the peptides identified were acquired. In total, 1589 unique proteins were identified and defined 251 as the temperature-dependent proteins. Analysis of genomic locations toward the correspondent genes of these temperature-dependent proteins revealed that more than 30% were contiguous units with relevant biological functions, which are likely to form the operon structures in T. tengcongensis. The RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data further demonstrated that these cluster genes were cotranscribed, and their mRNA abundance changes responding to temperature exhibited the similar trends as the proteomic results, suggesting that the temperature-dependent proteins are highly associated with the correspondent transcription status. Hence, the operon regulation is likely an energy-efficient mode for T. tengcongensis survival. In addition, evaluation to the functions of differential proteomes indicated that the abundance of the proteins participating in sulfur-respiration on the plasma membrane was decreased as the temperature increased, whereas the glycolysis-related protein abundance was increased. The energy supply in T. tengcongensis at high temperature is, therefore, speculated not mainly through the respiration chain reactions.