Comparative studies of peak intensities and chromatographic separation of proteolytic digests, PTMs, and intact proteins obtained by nanoLC-ESI MS analysis at room and elevated temperatures.

This work demonstrates that the chromatographic separation performed at highly stabilized elevated temperature results in significant improvements in sensitivity, quantitative accuracy, chromatographic resolution, and run-to-run reproducibility of nanoLC-MS analysis of complex peptides mixtures. A newly developed platform was shown to provide conditions for accurate temperature stabilization and temperature homogeneity when performing nanoLC-ESI MS analysis. We quantitatively assessed and compared the recovery of peptides and small proteins from nanoLC columns at room and elevated temperatures. We found that analyses performed at highly stabilized elevated temperatures led to improved detection sensitivity, reproducibility, and chromatographic resolution in reversed-phase LC separation of unmodified peptides (both hydrophilic and hydrophobic), post-translationally modified peptides (O-phosphorylated), and small intact proteins. The analytical benefits of elevated temperatures for qualitative and quantitative proteomic LC-MS profiling were demonstrated using mixtures of synthetic peptides, tryptic digests of mixtures of model proteins, and digested total lysates of isolated rat kidney mitochondria. The effect of elevated temperature on the ion suppression was also demonstrated. Graphical Abstract A fragment of overlaid LC retention time-m/z planar views demonstrates the improved separation performance in the analysis of a complex peptide mixture at elevated temperature. Retention time-m/z 2D peptide features detected at 60 °C (magenta) were matched and aligned with features detected at room temperature (green).

Comparison of in-gel protein separation techniques commonly used for fractionation in mass spectrometry-based proteomic profiling.

Fractionation of complex samples at the cellular, subcellular, protein, or peptide level is an indispensable strategy to improve the sensitivity in mass spectrometry-based proteomic profiling. This study revisits, evaluates, and compares the most common gel-based protein separation techniques i.e. 1D SDS-PAGE, 1D preparative SDS-PAGE, IEF-IPG, and 2D-PAGE in their performance as fractionation approaches in nano LC-ESI-MS/MS analysis of a mixture of protein standards and mitochondrial extracts isolated from rat liver. This work demonstrates that all the above techniques provide complementary protein identification results, but 1D SDS-PAGE and IEF-IPG had the highest number of identifications. The IEF-IPG technique resulted in the highest average number of detected peptides per protein. The 2D-PAGE was evaluated as a protein fractionation approach. This work shows that the recovery of proteins and resulting proteolytic digests is highly dependent on the total volume of the gel matrix. The performed comparison of the fractionation techniques demonstrates the potential of a combination of orthogonal 1D SDS-PAGE and IEF-IPG for the improved sensitivity of profiling without significant decrease in throughput.

A universal denoising and peak picking algorithm for LC-MS based on matched filtration in the chromatographic time domain.

A new denoising and peak picking algorithm (MEND, matched filtration with experimental noise determination) for analysis of LC-MS data is described. The algorithm minimizes both random and chemical noise in order to determine MS peaks corresponding to sample components. Noise characteristics in the data set are experimentally determined and used for efficient denoising. MEND is shown to enable low-intensity peaks to be detected, thus providing additional useful information for sample analysis. The process of denoising, performed in the chromatographic time domain, does not distort peak shapes in the m/z domain, allowing accurate determination of MS peak centroids, including low-intensity peaks. MEND has been applied to denoising of LC-MALDI-TOF-MS and LC-ESI-TOF-MS data for tryptic digests of protein mixtures. MEND is shown to suppress chemical and random noise and baseline fluctuations, as well as filter out false peaks originating from the matrix (MALDI) or mobile phase (ESI). In addition, MEND is shown to be effective for protein expression analysis by allowing selection of a large number of differentially expressed ICAT pairs, due to increased signal-to-noise ratio and mass accuracy.