The pea seedling mitochondrial Nε-lysine acetylome

• Lys-Nε-acetylated proteins were prepared from Pisum sativum seedling mitochondria.
• A total of 358 Lys-Nε-acetylated proteins were detected.
• The Lys-Nε-acetylome includes soluble and membrane-associated proteins.
• A putative mitochondrion-specific Lys-Nε-acetylation motif was identified.

Posttranslational lysine acetylation is believed to occur in all taxa and to affect thousands of proteins. In contrast to the hundreds of mitochondrial proteins reported to be lysine-acetylated in non-plant species, only a handful have been reported from the plant taxa previously examined. To investigate whether this reflects a biologically significant difference or merely a peculiarity of the samples thus far examined, we immunoenriched and analyzed acetylated peptides from highly purified pea seedling mitochondria using mass spectrometry. Our results indicate that a multitude of mitochondrial proteins, involved in a variety of processes, are acetylated in pea seedlings.