Selective enrichment and desalting of hydrophilic peptides using graphene oxide

• The selectivity for natural peptide of graphene oxide and RP-C18 matrix were compared.
• Graphene oxide has a stronger adsorption for hydrophilic peptides than RP-C18 matrix.
• Combination of two methods could increase the number of predicted protein precursors.
• It should be useful for peptidomics study.

The wide variety and low abundance of peptides in tissue brought great difficulties to the separation and identification of peptides, which is not in favor of the development of peptidomics. RP-HPLC, which could purify small molecules based on their hydrophobicity, has been widely used in the separation and enrichment of peptide due to its fast, good reproducibility and high resolution. However, RP-HPLC requires the instrument and expensive C18 column and its sample capacity is also limited. Recently, graphene oxide has been applied to the adsorption of amino acids. However, the enrichment efficiency and selectivity of graphene oxide for peptides remain unclear. In this study, the adsorption efficiency and selectivity of graphene oxide and RP-C18 matrix were compared on trypsinized α-actin and also on tissue extracts from pituitary gland and hippocampus. For α-actin, there exhibit similar elution peaks for total trypsinized products and those adsorpted by GO and C18 matrix. But peptides adsorbed by GO showed the higher hydrophilic peaks than which adsorbed by C18 matrix. The resulted RP-HPLC profile showed that most of peptides enriched by graphene oxide were eluted at low concentration of organic solvent, while peptides adsorbed by RP-C18 matrix were mostly eluted at relatively high concentration. Moreover, mass spectrometry analysis suggested that, in pituitary sample, there were 495 peptides enriched by graphene oxide, 447 peptides enriched by RP-C18 matrix while in hippocampus sample 333 and 243 peptides respectively. The GRAVY value analysis suggested that the graphene oxide has a stronger adsorption for highly hydrophilic peptides compared to the RP-C18 matrix. Furthermore, the combination of these two methods could notably increase the number of identification peptides but also the number of predicted protein precursors. Our study provided a new thought to the role of graphene oxide during the enrichment of peptides from tissue which should be useful for peptidomics study.