The ionic detergent sodium deoxycholate (SDC) is compatible with in-solution tryptic digestion and LC-MS/MS-based shotgun proteomics by virtue of being easy to separate from the peptide products via precipitation in acidic buffers. However, it remains unclear whether unique human peptides co-precipitate with SDC during acid treatment of complex biological samples. In this study, we demonstrate for the first time that a large quantity of unique peptides in human blood plasma can be co-precipitated with SDC using an optimized sample preparation method prior to shotgun proteomic analysis. We show that the plasma peptides co-precipitated with SDC can be successfully recovered using a sequential re-solubilization and precipitation procedure, and that this approach is particularly efficient at the extraction of long peptides. Recovery of peptides from the SDC pellet dramatically increased overall proteome coverage (>60 %), thereby improving the identification of low-abundance proteins and enhancing the identification of protein components of membrane-bound organelles. In addition, when we analyzed the physiochemical properties of the co-precipitated peptides, we observed that SDC-based sample preparation improved the identification of mildly hydrophilic/hydrophobic proteins that would otherwise be lost upon discarding the pellet. These data demonstrate that the optimized SDC protocol is superior to sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)/urea treatment for identifying plasma biomarkers by shotgun proteomics.
Keywords: Mass spectrometry; Plasma proteome; Shotgun proteomics; Sodium deoxycholate; Trypsin digestion.