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DMSO enhances electrospray response, boosting sensitivity of proteomic experiments

Nature Methods volume 10, pages 989–991 (2013)Cite this article

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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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Figure 1: DMSO improves the performance of LC-MS/MS–based bottom-up proteomics.
Figure 2: Impact of DMSO on the chromatographic behavior of peptides, the mass spectrometric signal background and the performance of different LC-MS/MS systems.

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Proteomics and Bioanalytics, Center of Life and Food Sciences Weihenstephan, Technische Universität München, Freising, Germany

    Hannes Hahne, Fiona Pachl, Benjamin Ruprecht, Stefan K Maier, Susan Klaeger, Dominic Helm, Guillaume Médard, Simone Lemeer & Bernhard Kuster

  2. Research Unit Analytical Pathology, Institute of Pathology, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Munich, Germany

    Stefan K Maier

  3. Conway Institute, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Matthias Wilm

  4. Center for Integrated Protein Science, Munich, Germany

    Bernhard Kuster

Authors
  1. Hannes Hahne
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  2. Fiona Pachl
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  3. Benjamin Ruprecht
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  4. Stefan K Maier
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  5. Susan Klaeger
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  6. Dominic Helm
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  7. Guillaume Médard
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  8. Matthias Wilm
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  9. Simone Lemeer
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  10. Bernhard Kuster
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Contributions

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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Correspondence to Bernhard Kuster.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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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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