Abstract
We report that low percentages of dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) in liquid chromatography solvents lead to a strong enhancement of electrospray ionization of peptides, improving the sensitivity of protein identification in bottom-up proteomics by up to tenfold. The method can be easily implemented on any LC-MS/MS system without modification to hardware or software and at no additional cost.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank numerous colleagues for stimulating discussions, P. Boersema and P. Picotti as well as L. Gethings, C. Hughes and J. Langridge for providing additional quadrupoletime-of-flight data and E. Hsieh and M. MacCoss for providing the software to extract chromatographic peakwidth data.
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H.H., F.P., B.R., S.K.M., S.K., D.H., G.M. and S.L. performed experiments; M.W. made numerous intellectual contributions; B.K. conceptualized the work and H.H. and B.K. wrote the manuscript.
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Hahne, H., Pachl, F., Ruprecht, B. et al. DMSO enhances electrospray response, boosting sensitivity of proteomic experiments. Nat Methods 10, 989–991 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2610
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2610
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