In-Gel Microwave-Assisted Acid Hydrolysis of Proteins Combined with Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry for Mapping Protein Sequences

We report an enabling method for mapping the protein sequence with high sequence coverage. This method combines the high separation power of gel electrophoresis for protein separation with the high sequence coverage capability of microwave-assisted acid hydrolysis (MAAH) mass spectrometry (MS). In-gel MAAH using 25% trifluoroacetic acid was developed and optimized for degrading the gel-separated protein into small peptides suitable for tandem MS sequencing. For bovine serum albumin (BSA) (∼67 kDa), with 4 μg of protein loading onto a gel for separation, followed by excising the protein gel band for in-gel MAAH and then injecting ∼2 μg of the resultant peptides into a liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer for analysis, 689 ± 54 (n = 3) unique peptides were identified with a protein sequence coverage of 99 ± 1%. Both the number of peptides detected and sequence coverage decreased as the sample amount decreased, mainly due to background interference: 316 ± 59 peptides and 94 ± 3% ...