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

摘要

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.