Proteome-wide ubiquitinome profiling reveals substrate-specific dynamics within the USP7 network

preprint OA: closed
Full text JSON View at publisher
Full text 2,073 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
ABSTRACT USP7 is a pleiotropic deubiquitylating enzyme that is involved in tumor suppression, (neuro)development, chromatin regulation and the DNA damage response. How USP7 regulates these diverse pathways is still unclear. Here, we report data-independent acquisition and label free quantitation mass spectrometry (DIA-LFQ-MS) to profile the proteome-wide impact of USP7 on substrate de-ubiquitylation and overall protein abundance. First, we identified proteins associated with endogenous USP7 by immunopurification followed by DIA-LFQ-MS. Integration of our new results with earlier interactomes of epitope-tagged USP7 yielded a consensus set of high-confidence protein targets. Domain mapping analysis revealed that, in addition to the TRAF domain, the ubiquitin-like domains of USP7 play a key role in substrate selection. Using specific enrichment of tryptic K-ε-GG peptides, we mapped proteome-wide changes in ubiquitinome dynamics following inhibition of USP7. Combining unbiased proteome-wide and targeted quantitative mass spectrometry revealed that deubiquitylation by USP7 can have different effects on the stability of distinct substrates, and suggests that USP7’s activity profile is substrate-dependent rather than an intrinsic enzymatic property. Thus, in addition to providing a proteome-wide map of USP7 target sites, our multi-angle proteomics approach reveals that the effects of USP7-mediated deubiquitylation on its targets are remarkably variable and substrate-specific. Finally, based on these detailed molecular insights we show how USP7 connects various neurodevelopmental syndromes and tumor suppression pathways. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes ↵6 Lead contact: c.verrijzer{at}erasmusmc.nl DATA AVAILABILITY The mass spectrometry proteomics data have been deposited to the ProteomeXchange Consortium via the PRIDE partner repository with the data set identifier PXD071773. All other data needed to evaluate the conclusions in this paper are present in the paper and Supplemental Materials.

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00