• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.1527-1534
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• 2010

The conventional peptide modification process of guanidination, in which the amino groups of lysine residues are converted to guanidino groups using O-methylisourea to create more basic homoarginine residues, is often used to improve the signal intensity of lysine-containing peptides in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS). Here, we used three different protease enzymes (trypsin, Lys-C, and Glu-C) to evaluate the effects of guanidination on the MS signals of two enzymatically digested proteins. Horse heart myoglobin and bovine serum albumin were guanidinated either before or after digestion with trypsin, Lys-C, or Glu-C. The resulting peptides were subjected to MALDI-MS, and signal intensities and sequence coverage were systematically evaluated for each digest. Guanidination prior to Glu-C digestion improved sequence coverage for both proteins. For myoglobin, guanidination before enzymatic digestion with trypsin or Lys-C also enhanced sequence coverage, but guanidination after enzymatic digestion enhanced sequence coverage only with Lys-C. For albumin, guanidination either before or after Glu-C digestion increased sequence coverage, whereas pre- or post-digestion guanidination decreased sequence coverage with trypsin and Lys-C. The amino acid composition of a protein appears to be the major factor determining whether guanidination will enhance its MALDI-MS sequence coverage.

• Analytical Science and Technology
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.114-120
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• 2012

For the qualitative analysis of peptides in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS), O-methylisourea, which is chemically bound to a specific site of an amino acid (e.g. lysine) of peptides and improves the intensities of the modified peptides, is frequently used prior to the MALDI-MS analysis of peptides, where the process is called guanidination. The reaction efficiency of guanidination varies depending on the reaction conditions. We investigated the efficiencies of guanidination of tryptically digested myoglobin using three different reagents (O-methylisourea, S-methylisothiourea, and 2-methyl-2-imidazoline) at $65^{\circ}C$ for 1 h with various pH conditions (pH 4.0, 7.0, and 10.5), where O-methylisourea and pH 10.5 were found to be most effective. The guanidination with O-methylisourea at pH 10.5 were then applied with different reaction conditions such as heating, microwave and ultrasound at various times, where heating for 60 min was found to be most effective. Conclusively, guanidination with O-methylisourea at $65^{\circ}C$ for 1 h at pH 10.5 was found to be the optimized condition.

• Preventive Nutrition and Food Science
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.10-15
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• 1996

To determine the quality of heated protein, in vitro method, invluding lysine, lysionalanine, and fructose-lysine as well as homoarginine by guanidination of lysine, was assessed using heated casein with of without glucose. In vivo methods such as PER, digestibility and BV were also tried on homoarginine, lysinoalanine, fructoselysine, and lysine. The nonreactive lysine for huanidination was hardly digestive, while the non heat damaged lysine side chanis in the protein were accessible for guanidination as well as for the digestion. A linear correlation(${\gamma}$=0.80) was obstained between PER and digestibility of the analysed lysine. Digestibility of homoarginine was higher that of true protein. However, in the guanidinated heated casein with glucose, digestibility of homoarginine was significantly reduced. It is suggested that the homoarginine method may mislead to over- or underestimation of the damaged protein quality.