MS from gels, top down or bottom up

Ayako Takemori, David S Butcher, Victoria M Harman, Philip Brownridge, Keisuke Shima, Daisuke Higo, Jun Ishizaki, Hitoshi Hasegawa, Junpei Suzuki, Masakatsu Yamashita, Joseph A Loo, Rachel R Ogorzalek Loo, Robert J Beynon, Lissa C Anderson, Nobuaki Takemori (2020) PEPPI-MS: Polyacrylamide-Gel-Based Prefractionation for Analysis of Intact Proteoforms and Protein Complexes by Mass Spectrometry J Proteome Res 19(9):3779-3791. doi: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00303.

Abstract
Prefractionation of complex mixtures of proteins derived from biological samples is indispensable for proteome analysis via top-down mass spectrometry (MS). Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), which enables high-resolution protein separation based on molecular size, is a widely used technique in biochemical experiments and has the potential to be useful in sample fractionation for top-down MS analysis. However, the lack of a means to efficiently recover the separated proteins in-gel has always been a barrier to its use in sample prefractionation. In this study, we present a novel experimental workflow, called Passively Eluting Proteins from Polyacrylamide gels as Intact species for MS ("PEPPI-MS"), which allows top-down MS of PAGE-separated proteins. The optimization of Coomassie brilliant blue staining followed by the passive extraction step in the PEPPI-MS workflow enabled the efficient recovery of proteins, separated on commercial precast gels, from a wide range of molecular weight regions in under 10 min. Two-dimensional separation combining offline PEPPI-MS with online reversed-phase liquid chromatographic separation resulted in identification of over 1000 proteoforms recovered from the target region of the gel (≤50 kDa). Given the widespread availability and relatively low cost of traditional sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)-PAGE equipment, the PEPPI-MS workflow will be a powerful prefractionation strategy for top-down proteomics.