Enrichment and Separation of Phosphorylated Peptides on Titanium Dioxide Surfaces Applied and Fundamental Studies

Abstract: Protein phosphorylation is a very common posttranslational modification (PTM), which lately has been found to hold the keyrole in the development of many severe diseases, including cancer. Thereby, phosphoprotein analysis tools, generally based on specific enrichment of the phosphoryl group, have been a hot topic during the last decade.In this thesis, two new TiO2-based on-target enrichment methods are developed and presented together with enlightening fundamental results.Evaluation of the developed methods was performed by the analysis of: custom peptides, ?-casein, drinking milk, and the viral protein pIIIa. The results show that: i) by optimizing the enrichment protocol (first method), new phosphorylated peptides can be found and ii) by the addition of a separation step after the enrichment (second method), more multi-phosphorylated peptides, which usually are hard to find, could be detected. The fundamental part, on the other hand, shows that the phosphopeptide adsorption is caused by electrostatic interactions, in general follows the Langmuir model, and the affinity increases with the phosphorylation degree. Here, however, the complexity of the system was also discovered, as the adsorption mechanism was found to be affected by the amino acid sequence of the phosphopeptide.