Deamidation as a widespread phenomenon in two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of human blood plasma proteins.

The human plasma protein patterns obtained by two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2-D PAGE) is a good model system for post-translational modifications because of the existence of several "ladders" of protein spots [Anderson, N. L., Anderson, N. G., Electrophoresis 1991, 12, 883-906], so-called "trains" of spots. Our investigation of several proteins, amongst others beta2-microglobulin and the haptoglobin chains, found the differences in isoelectric points (p/) to be due to deamidation of asparagines. After enzymatic cleavage with endopeptidases in the 2-D polyacrylamide gel, the asparagine and deamidated asparagine containing peptides were separated and quantified by reversed-phase HPLC. In order to separate these peptides, a neutral pH system was established and, as a result, the differences in hydrophobicity of asparagine-containing and deamidated asparagine-containing peptides increased. But how do deamidated asparagines contribute to the observed spot pattern? One spot in the 2-D gel consists of a mixture of protein species with the same number of deamidated asparagines but on different sequence position sites. The difference between the spots in the "ladder" is a growing number of negative charges introduced in the protein by an increasing number of deamidated asparagines. As a consequence, the mass difference between two spots is exactly 1 Da, which is shown in this paper for intact protein masses and the corresponding deamidated peptides.