Shake up your sample prep and a get 2x more phosphopeptides/sample!

 

Honestly, I thought this was going to be boring. How many phosphopeptide enrichment strategies do we actually need. However, when you see how much thought went into this, it is hard to not like it. 

The urea based bead elution is inspired. I wouldn't have thought of that and I'm not sure I understand why it works. However, it is fair to note that the biggest gains they get from this prep is from removing C-18 cleanup prior to injecting on column. Also - and this is really cool - this prep doesn't use phosphatase inhibitors! 

If the absolute number of phosphopeptides in total doesn't blow you away, they are doing Orbitrap-Orbitrap scans and the MS2 scans are done at 30,000 resolution with an auto ion injection time. I think on that means something like 10-15 scans/second on that particular tribrid system. They are clearly biasing this study to quality over quantity. So...2x more high confidence phosphopeptides/run? If you do phospho this is definitely worth checking out.

Oh yeah! And even if you don't do phosphoproteomics the introduction is really worth a read because it highlights why everyone seems so obsessed with these finicky things.