Nonenzymatic glycation of
peptides and
proteins by
d-glucose has important implications in the pathogenesis of
diabetes mellitus, particularly in the development of
diabetic complications. However, no effective high-throughput methods exist for identifying
proteins containing this low-abundance post-translational modification in bottom-up proteomic studies. In this report,
phenylboronate affinity chromatography was used in a two-step enrichment scheme to selectively isolate first
glycated proteins and then glycated, tryptic
peptides from human serum glycated in vitro. Enriched
peptides were subsequently analyzed by alternating electron-transfer dissociation (ETD) and collision induced dissociation (CID) tandem mass spectrometry. ETD fragmentation mode permitted identification of a significantly higher number of glycated
peptides (87.6% of all identified
peptides) versus CID mode (17.0% of all identified
peptides), when utilizing enrichment on first the
protein and then the
peptide level. This study illustrates that
phenylboronate affinity chromatography coupled with LC-MS/MS and using ETD as the fragmentation mode is an efficient approach for analysis of
glycated proteins and may have broad application in studies of
diabetes mellitus.