Synthesis of a metal oxide affinity chromatography magnetic mesoporous nanomaterial and development of a one-step selective phosphopeptide enrichment strategy for analysis of phosphorylated proteins

Abstract

Protein phosphorylation is one of the most vital protein post-translational modifications, which regulates numerous biological processes including protein structure transformation, molecular interaction, cell proliferation and apoptosis, as well as various malignant diseases. Though mass spectrometry (MS)-based technologies provide a feasible strategy to analyze phosphorylated proteins, label-free quantitative analysis for phosphopeptides in biological samples is still a challenging task due to sample losses from complicated preparation and necessary phosphopeptide enrichment. In this study, magnetic mesoporous TiO₂ microspheres, Fe₃O₄@nSiO₂@mSiO₂@TiO₂, a metal oxide affinity chromatography material, were synthesized with uniform particle size of 500 nm. The synthesized material exhibited good selectivity (molar ratio of β-casein:BSA = 1:2000, great sensitivity (0.5 fmol μL^-1β-casein), and good adsorption capacity (120 mg g^-1). Moreover, the proper mesopores on the surface of the enrichment material displayed the unique property of size-exclusion, which could 'capture' the trypsin and form a temporary immobilized enzyme reactor, reducing the tryptic digestion procedure from at least 16 h to 2 h. Based on the synthesized material, a facile one-step selective phosphopeptide enrichment method was successfully developed and consisted with protein digestion and phosphopeptide enrichment, which was further applied to selectively enrich phosphopeptides from the complex biological samples of nonfat milk and HepG2 cells, indicating its great feasibility and potential of applications in real sample analysis. More importantly, combining with MS, a label-free phosphoproteomic quantitative strategy was established and performed for determination of the mixture samples containing BSA and various concentrations of β-casein. The results showed that the obtained calibration curve was linear with R = 0.9987 by plotting the intensities of unique phosphopeptide of β-casein (m/z 2061.77) versus the concentrations of β-casein. Our study will provide a novel analytical strategy for selective enrichment of phosphopeptides and facile label-free relative quantitative analysis of phosphorylated proteins.

Keywords: Label-free quantitative analysis; Metal oxide affinity chromatography; One-step enrichment; Phosphopeptides; Post-modification.