Rapid online nonenzymatic protein digestion combining microwave heating acid hydrolysis and electrochemical oxidation

We report an online nonenzymatic method for site-specific digestion of proteins to yield peptides that are well suited for collision-induced dissociation tandem mass spectrometry. The method combines online microwave heating acid hydrolysis at aspartic acid and online electrochemical oxidation at tryptophan and tyrosine. The combined microwave/electrochemical digestion is reproducible and produces peptides with an average sequence length of 10 amino acids. This peptide length is similar to the average peptide length of 9 amino acids obtained by digestion of proteins with the enzyme trypsin. As a result, the peptides produced by this novel nonenzymatic digestion method, when analyzed by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, produce protonated molecules with mostly +1 and +2 charge states. The combination of these two nonenzymatic methods overcomes shortcomings with each individual method in that (i) peptides generated by the microwave-hydrolysis method have an average amino acid length of 16 amino acids and (ii) the electrochemical-cleavage method is unable to reproducibly digest proteins with molecular masses above 4 kDa. Preliminary results are presented on the application and utility of this rapid online digestion (total of 6 min of digestion time) on a series of standard peptides and proteins as well as an Escherichia coli protein extract.