Unsaturated phosphorus electrophiles to probe protein tyrosine phosphatases

Protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) represent an important pharmacological target and subject of study. To this end broad-spectrum electrophilic, phosphotyrosine-mimicking probes have been developed to covalently capture the catalytic site of these enzymes. Despite these efforts, there is still a high demand for synthetically straightforward accessible PTP-probes with high target selectivity. Unsaturated phosphorus-(V) (P(V)) compounds have recently emerged as powerful cysteine-selective bioconjugation reagents (P5-labeling). Here, we introduce ethynyl-substituted aryl-phosphonamidic and -phosphonic acids as phosphotyrosine mimics, which serve as active site-directed, covalent probes for tyrosine phosphatases. We show that these P(V)-electrophiles can be easily incorporated into a peptide sequence, allowing proximity-enabled reactivity and selective targeting of the catalytic cysteine of an interacting phosphatase, as exemplified for PTP1B, a protein tyrosine phosphatase that acts as a key negative regulator of insulin signaling. Both, ethynyl phosphonamidic and phosphonic acid show no reactivity towards non-affine cysteines, though the phosphonamidic acid probe was notably less reactive toward its intended target. Proteomics experiments in human cell lysates demonstrated that the phosphonic acid probe selectively enriches its interacting phosphatase in the human proteome. Our study highlights a versatile strategy to obtain remarkably precise peptide-based PTP-probes, thereby enabling the characterization of phosphatase interactions with high specificity.