A novel method for the selective enrichment of persulfidated peptides based on iodoacetic acid functionalized dendrimer

Abstract

Protein persulfidation is an important oxidative translational modification which plays vital roles in many important processes including cellular senescence, endoplasmic reticulum stress, vasorelaxation, and apoptosis. The proteome-wide analysis of persulfidation is of great importance; therefore, this study combines filter-aided sample preparation with an iodoacetic acid functionalized polyamidoamine dendrimer to enrich persulfidated peptides (denoted as filter-aided dendrimer enrichment strategy, FADE). To evaluate the performance of this strategy, the synthetic persulfidated standard peptide was spiked into bovine serum albumin (BSA) digests at a mass ratio of 1:100, and was successfully identified by FADE. Moreover, in combination with stable isotope labelling by amino acids in cell culture technology, the FADE strategy was applied to enrich persulfidated peptides from NaHS-stimulated SHSY5Y cells over a concentration gradient, resulting in the identification of 163 persulfidated peptides. Bioinformatic analysis indicated that persulfidation might play important roles in the central nervous system.