Zhengyan Hu

A poly(ethylene glycol)-brush decorated magnetic polymer for highly specific enrichment of phosphopeptides

Immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC) is a powerful method in phosphopeptide enrichment. However, the achievement of highly specific enrichment and sensitive detection of phosphopeptide by IMAC is still a big challenge because of the lack of high specificity and large binding capacity of conventional IMAC materials. Here, we report a novel IMAC nanoparticle to dramatically improve the enrichment specificity for the phosphopeptide by introducing a titanium phosphate moiety on a poly(ethylene glycol) methacrylate (PEG) brush decorated Fe3O4@SiO2 core–shell nanoparticle (denoted as Fe3O4@SiO2@PEG–Ti4+ IMAC nanoparticle). The thicker grafting layer of the PEG brushes has a higher chelating capacity of titanium ions. Due to the combination of the superior nonfouling property and the enhanced binding capacity of the grafted PEG brushes, the Fe3O4@SiO2@PEG–Ti4+ IMAC nanoparticle demonstrated a high phosphopeptide recovery (over 70%) and low limit of detection (0.5 fmol), along with an exceptional great specificity to capture phosphopeptides from a tryptic digest of the mixture of a nonphosphorylated protein BSA and a phosphorylated protein α-casein with molar ratios of BSA/α-casein up to 2000 : 1. In the analysis of a real complex biological sample, the tryptic digests of Arabidopsis, 2447 unique phosphopeptides have been identified, showing a superior performance of the Fe3O4@SiO2@PEG–Ti4+ IMAC nanoparticle than that of Fe3O4@SiO2–Ti4+ (1186) and commercial TiO2 microspheres (961). We believe that the PEG decoration for IMAC materials will be a convenient approach to significantly improve the specificity and the binding capacity of phosphopeptide enrichment.

Nanoparticle size matters in the formation of plasma protein coronas on Fe3O4 nanoparticles.

When nanoparticles (NPs) enter into biological systems, proteins would interact with NPs to form the protein corona that can critically impact the biological identity of the nanomaterial. Owing to their fundamental scientific interest and potential applications, Fe3O4 NPs of different sizes have been developed for applications in cell separation and protein separation and as contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), etc. Here, we investigated whether nanoparticle size affects the formation of protein coronas around Fe3O4 NPs. Both the identification and quantification results demonstrated that particle size does play an important role in the formation of plasma protein coronas on Fe3O4 NPs; it not only influenced the protein composition of the formed plasma protein corona but also affected the abundances of the plasma proteins within the coronas. Understanding the different binding profiles of human plasma proteins on Fe3O4 NPs of different sizes would facilitate the exploration of the bio-distributions and biological fates of Fe3O4 NPs in biological systems.

Highly Efficient Extraction of Cellular Nucleic Acid Associated Proteins in Vitro with Magnetic Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes

Nucleic acid associated proteins (NAaP) play the essential roles in gene regulation and protein expression. The global analysis of cellular NAaP would give a broad insight to understand the interaction between nucleic acids and the associated proteins, such as the important proteinous regulation factors on nucleic acids. Proteomic analysis presents a novel strategy to investigate a group of proteins. However, the large scale analysis of NAaP is yet impossible due to the lack of approaches to harvest target protein groups with a high efficiency. Herein, a simple and efficient method was developed to collect cellular NAaP using magnetic oxidized carbon nanotubes based on the strong interaction between carbon nanotubes and nucleic acids along with corresponding associated proteins. We found that the magnetic oxidized carbon nanotubes demonstrated a nearly 100% extraction efficiency for intracellular nucleic acids from cells in vitro. Importantly, the proteins associated on nucleic acids could be highly efficiently harvested using magnetic oxidized carbon nanotubes due to the binding of NAaP on nucleic acids. 1594 groups of nuclear NAaP and 2595 groups of cellular NAaP were extracted and identified from about 1,000,000 cells, and 803 groups of NAaP were analyzed with only about 10,000 cells, showing a promising performance for the proteomic analysis of NAaP from minute cellular samples. This highly efficient extraction strategy for NAaP is a simple approach to identify cellular nucleic acid associated proteome, and we believed this strategy could be further applied in systems biology to understand the gene expression and regulation.

Cell Nucleus Targeting for Living Cell Extraction of Nucleic Acid Associated Proteins with Intracellular Nanoprobes of Magnetic Carbon Nanotubes

Since nanoparticles could be ingested by cells naturally and target at a specific cellular location as designed, the extraction of intracellular proteins from living cells for large-scale analysis by nanoprobes seems to be ideally possible. Nucleic acid associated proteins (NAaP) take the crucial position during biological processes in maintaining and regulating gene structure and gene related behaviors, yet there are still challenges during the global investigation of intracellular NAaP, especially from living cells. In this work, a strategy to extract intracellular proteins from living cells with the magnetic carbon nanotube (oMWCNT@Fe3O4) as an intracellular probe is developed, to achieve the high throughput analysis of NAaP from living human hepatoma BEL-7402 cells with a mass spectrometry-based proteomic approach. Due to the specific intracellular localization of the magnetic carbon nanotubes around nuclei and its strong interaction with nucleic acids, the highly efficient extraction was realized for cellular NAaP from living cells, with the capability of identifying 2383 intracellular NAaP from only ca. 10,000 living cells. This method exhibited potential applications in dynamic and in situ analysis of intracellular proteins.

The on-bead digestion of protein corona on nanoparticles by trypsin immobilized on the magnetic nanoparticle

Proteins interacting with nanoparticles would form the protein coronas on the surface of nanoparticles in biological systems, which would critically impact the biological identities of nanoparticles and/or result in the physiological and pathological consequences. The enzymatic digestion of protein corona was the primary step to achieve the identification of protein components of the protein corona for the bottom-up proteomic approaches. In this study, the investigation on the tryptic digestion of protein corona by the immobilized trypsin on a magnetic nanoparticle was carried out for the first time. As a comparison with the usual overnight long-time digestion and the severe self-digestion of free trypsin, the on-bead digestion of protein corona by the immobilized trypsin could be accomplished within 1h, along with the significantly reduced self-digestion of trypsin and the improved reproducibility on the identification of proteins by the mass spectrometry-based proteomic approach. It showed that the number of identified bovine serum (BS) proteins on the commercial Fe3O4 nanoparticles was increased by 13% for the immobilized trypsin with 1h digestion as compared to that of using free trypsin with even overnight digestion. In addition, the on-bead digestion of using the immobilized trypsin was further applied on the identification of human plasma protein corona on the commercial Fe3O4 nanoparticles, which leads the efficient digestion of the human plasma proteins and the identification of 149 human plasma proteins corresponding to putative critical pathways and biological processes.

Elevating mitochondrial reactive oxygen species by mitochondria-targeted inhibition of superoxide dismutase with a mesoporous silica nanocarrier for cancer therapy

AbstractIn the intrinsic pathway of apoptosis, stresses of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (mitoROS) might be sensed as more effective signals than those in cytosol, as mitochondria are the major sources of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and pivotal components during cell apoptosis. Mitochondrial superoxide dismutase (SOD2) takes the leading role in eliminating mitoROS, and inhibition of SOD2 might induce severe disturbances overwhelming the mitochondrial oxidative equilibrium, which would elevate the intracellular oxidative stresses and drive cells to death. Herein, we report a general strategy to kill cancer cells by targeted inhibition of SOD2 using 2-methoxyestradiol (2-ME, an inhibitor for the SOD family) via a robust mitochondria-targeted mesoporous silica nanocarrier (mtMSN), with the expected elevation of mitoROS and activation of apoptosis in HeLa cells. Fe3O4@MSN was employed in the mitochondria-targeted drug delivery and selective inhibition of mitochondrial enzymes, and was shown to be stable with good biocompatibility and high loading capacity. Due to the selective inhibition of SOD2 by 2-ME/mtMSN, enhanced elevation of mitoROS (132% of that with free 2-ME) was obtained, coupled with higher efficiency in initiating cell apoptosis (395% of that with free 2-ME in 4 h). Finally, the 2-ME/mtMSN exhibited powerful efficacy in targeted killing of HeLa cells by taking advantage of both biological recognition and magnetic guiding, causing 97.0% cell death with only 2 μg/mL 2-ME/mtMSN, hinting at its great potential in cancer therapy through manipulation of the delicate mitochondrial oxidative balance.

Identification of Chemoresistance-Related Cell-Surface Glycoproteins in Leukemia Cells and Functional Validation of Candidate Glycoproteins

Chemoresistance remains the most significant obstacle to successful chemotherapy for leukemia, and its exact mechanism is still unknown. In this work, we used the cell-surface capturing method together with quantitative proteomics to investigate differences in the glycoproteomes of adriamycin-sensitive and adriamycin-resistant leukemia cells. Two quantitative methods, isotopic dimethyl labeling and SWATH, were used to quantify glycoproteins, and 35 glycoproteins were quantified by both methods. High correlation was observed between the glycoproteins quantified by the above two methods, and 15 glycoproteins displayed a consistent significant change trend in both sets of quantitative results. These 15 proteins included classical multidrug resistance-related glycoproteins such as ABCB1 as well as a set of novel glycoproteins that have not previously been reported to be associated with chemoresistance in leukemia cells. Further validation with quantitative real-time PCR and Western blotting confirmed the proteomic screening results. Subsequent functional experiments based on RNA interference technology showed that CTSD, FKBP10, and SLC2A1 are novel genes that participate in the acquisition and maintenance of the adriamycin-resistant phenotype in leukemia cells.

Polyacrylamide Gel with Switchable Trypsin Activity for Analysis of Proteins

Trypsin was immobilized on a variety of materials to improve digestion efficiency. However, because the immobilized trypsin will digest proteins during electrophoresis, direct immobilization of active trypsin in polyacrylamide gel will compromise the protein separation. To overcome this problem, here we report a novel polyacrylamide gel with switchable trypsin activity. It was prepared by copolymerization of the PEG-trypsin-aprotinin complex during the gel-casting step. Because the inhibitor aprotinin binds strongly with trypsin at alkaline pH, this novel gel does not display hydrolytic activity during electrophoresis. After electrophoresis, the activity of trypsin embedded in gel could be recovered by simply washing away the bound inhibitor at a low pH. It was demonstrated that this unique switchable activity design allowed high resolution of the complex protein mixture during electrophoresis and highly efficient digestion of the separated proteins in situ in the gel after electrophoresis.

A nano-bio interfacial protein corona on silica nanoparticle

Nano-bio interaction takes the crucial role in bio-application of nanoparticles. The systematic mapping of interfacial proteins remains the big challenge as low level of proteins within interface regions and lack of appropriate technology. Here, a facile proteomic strategy was developed to characterize the interfacial protein corona (noted as IPC) that has strong interactions with silica nanoparticle, via the combination of the vigorous elution with high concentration sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and the pre-isolation of sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). The trace level IPCs for silica nanoparticle were thus qualitatively and quantitatively identified. Bioinformatics analyses revealed the intrinsic compositions, relevance and potential regularity addressing the strong interactions between IPC and nanoparticle. This strategy in determining IPCs is opening an avenue to give a deep insight to understand the interaction between proteins and not only nanoparticles but also other bulk materials.