Co-translational profiling in the cardiac endothelium in response to LPS-induced inflammation in female mice in vivo: a proof-of-concept approach

Producing functional proteins involves multiple steps during mRNA translation on the ribosomes. However, co-translational regulatory mechanisms remain poorly characterized in intact mammalian systems. As a proof-of-concept, we developed a multi-omics approach to investigate endothelial-specific, co-translational regulation by modifying the translating ribosome affinity purification (TRAP) in vivo. We simultaneously co-immunoprecipitated (IP) polysome-associated mRNAs and proteins from the hearts of hemagglutinin-tagged ribosomal protein L22 mice (RiboTag) crossed with inducible endothelial-specific Cdh5CreERT2 mice (RiboTagEC). To perturb endothelial function, female mice were injected with E. coli lipopolysaccharide (LPS) (6 mg/Kg, i.p., 12 h). Hearts were homogenized, with ~ 10% used for input RNA-Seq and proteomics controls, and the remainder for IP of ribosome-bound polyadenylated mRNA and proteins. Endothelial cell transcripts (pecam1, cdh5) were enriched > 5-fold, while markers characteristic of other cell types were significantly depleted (< 0.05 q-value). We aligned transcriptomic and proteomic datasets (> 1250 overlapping terms) to identify pathways associated with concordant and discordant co-translational regulation. LPS was identified as the upstream regulator of the co-translational dataset that was concordantly regulated. Upregulated mRNAs but not proteins related to glycolysis were discordantly regulated. These findings validate our proof-of-concept multi-omics approach as a predictive platform for identifying disease-relevant pathways regulated at the co-translational level in vivo.