PNNL

Abstract

Elevated levels of protein tyrosine nitration have been found in various neurodegenerative diseases and aging related pathologies; however, the lack of an efficient enrichment method has prevented the analysis of this important low level protein modification. We have developed an efficient method for specific enrichment of nitrotyrosine containing peptides that permits nitrotyrosine peptides and specific nitration sites to be unambiguously identified with LC-MS/MS. The method is based on the derivatization of nitrotyrosine into free sulfhydryl groups followed by high efficiency enrichment of sulfhydryl-containing peptides with thiopropyl sepharose beads. The derivatization process starts with acetylation with acetic anhydride to block all primary amines, followed by reduction of nitrotyrosine to aminotyrosine, then derivatization of aminotyrosine with N-Succinimidyl S-Acetylthioacetate (SATA), and finally deprotecting of S-acetyl on SATA to form free sulfhydryl groups. This method was evaluated using nitrotyrosine containing peptides, in-vitro nitrated human histone 1.2, and bovine serum albumin (BSA). 91% and 62% of the identified peptides from enriched histone and BSA samples were nitrotyrosine derivatized peptides, respectively, suggesting relative high specificity of the enrichment method. The application of this method to in-vitro nitrated mouse brain homogenate resulted in 35% of identified peptides containing nitrotyrosine (compared to only 5.9% observed from the global analysis of unenriched sample), and a total of 150 unique nitrated peptides covering 102 proteins were identified with a false discovery rate estimated at 3.3% from duplicate LC-MS/MS analyses of a single enriched sample.