A combination method of chemical with enzyme reactions for identification of membrane proteins

A simple method for effective analysis of various proteins has been developed, including membrane proteins, with LC–MS/MS, using CNBr and acetic acid cleavage in one reaction for the digestion of both the M/ and /D/ positions within the target proteins. This dual chemical reaction has been compared with traditional CNBr or an acid cleavage method using a rat kidney membrane fraction and it showed an advantage of the dual reaction with respect to a high number of peptides detected and a high protein recovery. Furthermore, when this dual chemical reaction was combined with trypsin digestion, the number of proteins surprisingly increased approximately 3.0 times more than in the cases with the trypsin digestion only. It was also 1.9 times more than in cases dealing with Tube-Gel trypsin digestion, which is one of the most efficient digestion methods. In addition, it was shown that this dual chemical reaction could be applied to an in-gel digestion. Using the combination of the chemical and enzyme reaction, 172 proteins including 95 membrane proteins were identified. This indicated that this method is one of the efficient systems in single MS/MS analysis. In particular, many membrane proteins identified in this study were detected by a new combination, but not by a traditional trypsin digestion method.

Graphical AbstractFigure optionsDownload high-quality image (46 K)Download as PowerPoint slideResearch Highlights
► CNBr and acetic acid cleave N-term of D as well as C-term of M and D residues.
► Chemicals have denaturing effect on membrane lipid bilayer structure.
► Dual reaction of chemicals-trypsin increases the membrane protein identification.