Cysteine Glutathionylation as a Global Dynamic Regulator of Protein Active Site Accessibility and Protein Complex Formation

Abstract

Protein-glutathionylation is traditionally viewed as a protective mechanism that shields cysteine-residues from irreversible oxidative damage. Its broader functional roles remain poorly understood, in part due to technical limitations in detecting this modification at scale. Here, we develop and leverage a new mass-spectrometry approach that preserves protein-glutathionylation, thereby revealing its widespread distribution across the proteome in cell models, worms, mice and human cardiac tissues. In all cases, we find that glutathionylation sites are enriched at both protein-protein interfaces and protein-active sites, and are highly conserved across species. We find that glutathionylation is dynamically redistributed in response to environmental challenges, thereby driving remodelling of cellular protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, and access to protein active sites, with functional and phenotypic consequences. Finally, we show that glutathionylation accumulates on key cardiac-sarcomeric proteins in aged-mice and human cardiomyopathy biopsies, revealing its role in cardiovascular dysfunction. These findings reposition glutathionylation as a crucial regulatory PTM, akin to phosphorylation, that orchestrates adaptive cellular responses. This work redefines the role of glutathionylation, with broad implications for cell biology and disease.