Perovskite for the highly selective enrichment of phosphopeptides

Selective and effective enrichment of phosphopeptides from complex samples is essential in phosphoproteome study by mass spectrometry (MS). In this work, we compared perovskites (MgTiO3, CaTiO3, SrTiO3, BaTiO3 and CaZrO3) with metal oxides (ZrO2 and TiO2) in their capability for the selective enrichment of phosphopeptides. It was found here that perovskites exhibited higher selectivity towards phosphopeptides than commonly used ZrO2 and TiO2, even though they all have high affinity to phosphopeptides. As for perovskites, CaTiO3 exhibited better selectivity for enrichment of phosphopeptides than SrTiO3, MgTiO3, BaTiO3 and CaZrO3, which might be ascribed to their crystal structures and electrophilic abilities. Moreover, to further confirm the performance of CaTiO3, CaTiO3 and TiO2 were applied to the enrichment of phosphopeptides from tryptic digest of proteins of human Jurkat-T cell lysate, respectively. The results showed CaTiO3 has much higher selectivity than TiO2 in the enrichment of phosphopeptides from the complex biological sample. Taken together, here we show that CaTiO3 is an excellent material for the highly selective enrichment of phosphopeptides and it could be potentially used in the large-scale phosphoproteome study.