Separation Of Hydrophobic Peptides Research Articles

Targeted Profiling of Arabidopsis thaliana Subproteomes Illuminates Co- and Posttranslationally N-Terminal Myristoylated Proteins.

N-terminal myristoylation, a major eukaryotic protein lipid modification, is difficult to detect in vivo and challenging to predict in silico. We developed a proteomics strategy involving subfractionation of cellular membranes, combined with separation of hydrophobic peptides by mass spectrometry-coupled liquid chromatography to identify the Arabidopsis thaliana myristoylated proteome. This approach identified a starting pool of 8837 proteins in all analyzed cellular fractions, comprising 32% of the Arabidopsis proteome. Of these, 906 proteins contain an N-terminal Gly at position 2, a prerequisite for myristoylation, and 214 belong to the predicted myristoylome (comprising 51% of the predicted myristoylome of 421 proteins). We further show direct evidence of myristoylation in 72 proteins; 18 of these myristoylated proteins were not previously predicted. We found one myristoylation site downstream of a predicted initiation codon, indicating that posttranslational myristoylation occurs in plants. Over half of the identified proteins could be quantified and assigned to a subcellular compartment. Hierarchical clustering of protein accumulation combined with myristoylation and S-acylation data revealed that N-terminal double acylation influences redirection to the plasma membrane. In a few cases, MYR function extended beyond simple membrane association. This study identified hundreds of N-acylated proteins for which lipid modifications could control protein localization and expand protein function.

Prefractionation and separation by C8 stationary phase: Effective strategies for integral membrane proteins analysis

Analysis of integral membrane proteins (IMPs) presents great challenges due to their hydrophobic nature. Recently, much attention has been paid to improve the solubilization of IMPs. However, besides that, the separation of hydrophobic peptides with high recovery is also a dominating factor, but with rare report. Here, the prefractionation of the digests by reverse phase trap column during desalting was presented to efficiently decrease the complexity of samples, with the identified hydrophobic peptides and IMPs increased by more than 43%. Furthermore, the effect of C18 and C8 stationary phases on the separation of membrane protein digests was studied. A total of 301 proteins (536 peptides) with C18 stationary phase and 398 proteins (703 peptides) with C8 stationary phase were identified by μRPLC–ESI-MS/MS using an LCQ instrument in duplicate runs, with false discovery rate (FDR) less than 5% at peptide level. In addition, with C8 stationary phase, the number of identified hydrophobic peptides and IMPs was obviously improved by 29% and 20%, respectively, compared with that identified by C18 stationary phase, indicating that the polarity of stationary phase has evident effect on the analysis of membrane protein digests. All these results show that the prefractionation by reverse phase trap column during desalting and the separation by C8 stationary phases could facilitate the efficient identification of IMPs.

Capillary electrophoretic separation and fractionation of hydrophobic peptides onto a pre-structured matrix assisted laser desorption/ionization target for mass spectrometric analysis

A CE separation of hydrophobic peptides followed by fractionation onto a prestructured MALDI target and off-line MS analysis was performed. An improved and partially automated manufacturing procedure of the previously described MALDI target is presented. This target is structurally coated with silicone and especially developed for hydrophobic peptides and proteins. Here, the target plate was designed specifically for the CE fraction collection. Different solvents were evaluated to meet the requirements of peptide solubility and compatibility to both the CE and MALDI methods and to the fractionation procedure. CE-MALDI-MS analysis of nine highly hydrophobic peptides from cyanogen bromide-digested bacteriorhodopsin is demonstrated.