Microwave-assisted protein preparation and enzymatic digestion in proteomics

The combinations of gel electrophoresis or LC and mass spectrometry are two popular approaches for large scale protein identification. However, the throughput of both approaches is limited by the speed of the protein diges-tion process. Present research into fast protein enzymatic digestion has been focused mainly on known proteins, and it is unclear whether these results can be extrapo-lated to complex protein mixtures. In this study micro-wave technology was used to develop a fast protein prep-aration and enzymatic digestion method for protein mixtures. The protein mixtures in solution or in gel were prepared and digested by microwave-assisted protein en-zymatic digestion, which rapidly produces peptide frag-ments. The peptide fragments were further analyzed by capillary LC and ESI-ion trap-MS or MALDI-TOF-MS. Th