The use of chemical probes to detect the proteomics of renal tubular injury induced by maleic acid

Maleic acid (MA), an industrial raw material, was found to be illegally added to edible starch-based food products in Taiwan in 2013, a practice unheard of in most of the world. MA has been associated with renal dysfunction in many experimental animal studies. In this study, we developed chemical probes to investigate protein-protein interactions between MA and renal proteins. In the fabrication of the MA probes, we used silicon dioxide (SiO2) modified with a silanized linker (3-aminopropyl triethoxyslane, APTES) to generate MA with APTES-SiO2 particles. The probes were then incubated with the cell lysates of normal human kidney cell lines (HK-2) and subjected to MS/MS for identifying several MA-related proteins, including nucleophosmin, neutral alpha-glucosidase AB, translocon-associated protein subunit alpha, elongation factor 1-gamma, 60S acidic ribosomal protein P0-like, and heat shock protein (HSP 90-alpha and beta). Based on our findings, we believed that the probe can potentially be used to identify and detect the target proteins and help characterize a network of MA protein-protein interactions.