Hydrogen bond-based smart polymer for highly selective and tunable capture of multiply phosphorylated peptides

Guangyan Qing, Qi Lu, Xiuling Li*, Jing Liu, Mingliang Ye, Xinmiao Liang* and Taolei Sun*

Nat. Commun., 2017, 8, 461

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00464-0

Multisite phosphorylation is an important and common mechanism for finely regulating protein functions and subsequent cellular responses. However, this study is largely restricted by the difficulty to capture low-abundance multiply phosphorylated peptides (MPPs) from complex biosamples owing to the limitation of enrichment materials and their interactions with phosphates. Here we show that smart polymer can serve as an ideal platform to resolve this challenge. Driven by specific but tunable hydrogen bonding interactions, the smart polymer displays differential complexation with MPPs, singly phosphorylated and non-modified peptides. Importantly, MPP binding can be modulated conveniently and precisely by solution conditions, resulting in highly controllable MPP adsorption on material surface. This facilitates excellent performance in MPP enrichment and separation from model proteins and real biosamples. High enrichment selectivity and coverage, extraordinary adsorption capacities and recovery towards MPPs, as well as high discovery rates of unique phosphorylation sites, suggest its great potential in phosphoproteomics studies.