Magnetic immunoaffinity enrichment for selective capture and MS/MS analysis of N-terminal-TMPP-labeled peptides

Proteogenomics is the alliance of proteomics and genomics with the aim of better annotating structural genes based on experimental, protein-based data items established by tandem mass spectrometry. While, on average, more than one-tenth of protein N-termini are incorrectly annotated, there is a crucial need for methodological approaches to systematically establish the translational starts of polypeptides, and their maturations, such as N-terminal methionine processing and peptide signal excision. Refinement of genome annotation through correction of wrongly annotation initiation start site and detection of unannotated genes can be achieved after enrichment and detection of protein N-termini by mass spectrometry. Here we describe a straightforward strategy to specifically label protein N-termini with a positively charged TMPP label to selectively capture these entities with in-house-developed anti-TMPP antibodies coupled to magnetic beads and to analyze them by nanoLC-MS/MS. While most N-terminomics-oriented approaches are based on the depletion of internal peptides to retrieve N-terminal peptides, this enrichment approach is fast and the results are highly specific for improved, ionizable, TMPP-labeled peptides. The whole proteome of the model marine bacterium, Roseobacter denitrificans, was analyzed, leading to the identification of more than twice the number of N-terminal peptides compared with the nonenriched fraction. A total of 269 proteins were characterized in terms of their N-termini. In addition, three unannotated genes were identified based on multiple, redundant N-terminal peptides. Our strategy greatly simplifies the systematic and automatic proteogenomic annotation of genomes as well as degradomics-oriented approaches, focusing the mass spectrometric efforts on the most crucial enriched fractions.