It is well established that palmitoylation plays a key role in the regulation of immune checkpoints, but the technical challenges in detecting protein palmitoylation have significantly prohibited further researches in this field. Till now, different approaches have been proposed, such as mutagenesis, antibody-based methods, bioinformatic prediction, "palmitate-centric" approaches, and "cysteine-centric" approaches. Of specific importance, high-throughput methods that allow the unbiased discovery of palmitoylation in the whole proteome should be further improved and employed. This chapter will summarize the methodological progresses for detecting protein palmitoylation, aiming to facilitate future researches in the lipid modification of immune checkpoint proteins.
Keywords: Antibody-based detection; Mass spectrometry; Metabolic labeling; Mutagenesis; Palmitoylation.