Trypsin dominates bottom-up proteomics, but there are reasons to consider alternative enzymes. Improving sequence coverage, exposing proteomic "dark matter," and clustering post-translational modifications in different ways and with higher-order drive the pursuit of reagents complementary to trypsin. Additionally, enzymes that are easy to use and generate larger peptides that capitalize upon newer fragmentation technologies should have a place in proteomics. We expressed and characterized recombinant neprosin, a novel prolyl endoprotease of the DUF239 family, which preferentially cleaves C-terminal to proline residues under highly acidic conditions. Cleavage also occurs C-terminal to alanine with some frequency, but with an intriguingly high "skipping rate." Digestion proceeds to a stable end point, resulting in an average peptide mass of 2521 units and a higher dependence upon electron-transfer dissociation for peptide-spectrum matches. In contrast to most proline-cleaving enzymes, neprosin effectively degrades proteins of any size. For 1251 HeLa cell proteins identified in common using trypsin, Lys-C, and neprosin, almost 50% of the neprosin sequence contribution is unique. The high average peptide mass coupled with cleavage at residues not usually modified provide new opportunities for profiling clusters of post-translational modifications. We show that neprosin is a useful reagent for reading epigenetic marks on histones. It generates peptide 1-38 of histone H3 and peptide 1-32 of histone H4 in a single digest, permitting the analysis of co-occurring post-translational modifications in these important N-terminal tails.

‖Thermo Fisher Scientific San Jose California 95134

§BioCev Institute of Microbiology Czech Academy of Sciences Vestec Czech Republic 117

¶Department of Biochemistry Faculty of Science Charles University Prague Prague Czech Republic 116

**Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute Sinai Health System Toronto Ontario Canada M5G 1X5; and

‡‡Department of Chemistry University of Calgary Calgary Alberta Canada T2N 4N1

From the ‡Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology University of Calgary Calgary Alberta T2N4N1 Canada

From the ‡Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology University of Calgary Calgary Alberta T2N4N1 Canada;

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Postproline Cleaving Enzymes also Show Specificity to Reduced Cysteine