Running Title: SILAC in fission yeast

Stable Isotope Labeling by Amino Acids (SILAC) is a commonly used method in quantitative proteomics. Due to compatibility with trypsin digestion, arginine and lysine are the most widely used amino acids for SILAC labeling. We observed that Schizosaccharomyces pombe (fission yeast) cannot be labeled with a specific form of arginine, 13C615N4-arginine (Arg-10), which limits the exploitation of SILAC technology in this model organism. We hypothesized that in the fission yeast the guanidinium group of 13C615N4-arginine is catabolized by arginase and urease activity to 15N1-labeled ammonia that is used as a precursor for general amino acid biosynthesis. We show that disruption of Ni2+-dependent urease activity, through deletion of the sole Ni2+ transporter Nic1, blocks this re-cycling in ammonium-supplemented EMMG medium to enable 13C615N4-arginine labeling for SILAC strategies in S. pombe. Finally, we employed Arg-10 in a triple-SILAC experiment to perform quantitative comparison of G1 + S, M and G2 cell cycle phases in S. pombe