PTMNavigator: Interactive Visualization of Differentially Regulated Post-Translational Modifications in Cellular Signaling Pathways

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) play pivotal roles in regulating cellular signaling, fine-tuning protein function, and orchestrating complex biological processes. Despite their importance, the lack of comprehensive tools for studying PTMs from a pathway-centric perspective has limited our ability to understand how PTMs modulate cellular pathways on a molecular level. Here, we present PTMNavigator, a tool integrated into the ProteomicsDB platform, which offers an interactive interface for researchers to overlay experimental PTM data with pathway diagrams. PTMNavigator provides ∼3000 canonical pathways from manually curated databases and further enables users to modify and create custom diagrams, tailored to their data. Additionally, PTMNavigator automatically runs multiple kinase and pathway enrichment algorithms whose results are directly integrated into the visualization. This offers a comprehensive view of the intricate relationship between PTMs and signaling pathways. To demonstrate the utility of PTMNavigator, we applied it to two phosphoproteomics perturbation datasets. First, PTMNavigator enhanced pathway enrichment analysis by showing how the regulated peptides and proteins are distributed in the pathways with high enrichment scores. Second, it visualized how drug treatments result in a discernable flow of PTM-driven signaling within pathways. Third, PTMNavigator aided in proposing extensions to an existing pathway by suggesting putative new links between both PTMs and pathway components. By enhancing our understanding of cellular signaling dynamics and facilitating the discovery of novel PTM-pathway interactions, PTMNavigator advances our knowledge of PTM biology and its implications in health and disease.