Evaluating the potential nonthermal microwave effects of microwave-assisted proteolytic reactions

Microwave-assisted proteolytic digestion methods have evolved into a highly effective approach and serve as an alternative to conventional overnight digestion. This approach typically exploits the unique microwave properties to facilitate the digestion of proteins into their peptides within minutes. Conventional digestion is carried out at 37 °C while microwave-assisted digestion requires much higher and sometimes inconsistent temperatures. Thus, this study aims to investigate whether the faster reaction rate is due to the microwave quantum effect or the thermal effect. Quantitative mass spectrometry was used to conduct kinetic analysis of tryptic digestion for several proteins by microwave and conventional heating. The percentages of digestion products relative to internal standards showed no significant difference between microwave and conventional heating conditions at the same digestion temperature. The optimum temperature for tryptic digestion was determined to be 50 °C. Furthermore, this study compares the digestion completeness indicators of several proteins under microwave and conventional heating. Again, the values obtained from microwave and conventional heating were similar given identical temperatures. The overall results prove that a nonthermal effect does not exist in microwave-assisted tryptic digestion. Therefore, conventional heating at high temperatures (50 °C) can be also used to accelerate digestion reactions.

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► Quantitative mass spectrometry is used to investigate microwave effects.
► We have clarified how the microwave irradiation affects the enzyme-catalyzed proteolytic reactions.
► A critical examination of several proteins provides no evidence of non-thermal microwave effects.
► Both microwave and heating bath can be used to accelerate enzymatic digestion.