An antibody‐free enrichment approach enabled by reductive glutaraldehydation for monomethyllysine proteome analysis

Protein lysine monomethylation is an important post‐translational modification participated in regulating many biological processes. There is growing interest in identifying these methylation events. However, the introduction of one methyl group on lysine residues has negligible effect on changing the physical and chemical properties of proteins or peptides, making enriching and identifying monomethylated lysine (Kme1) proteins or peptides extraordinarily challenging. In this study, we proposed an antibody‐free chemical proteomics approach to capture Kme1 peptides from complex protein digest. By exploiting reductive glutaraldehydation, 5‐aldehyde‐pentanyl modified Kme1 residues and piperidine modified primary amines were generated at the same time. The peptides with aldehyde modified Kme1 residues were then enriched by solid‐phase hydrazide chemistry. This chemical proteomics approach was validated by using several synthetic peptides. It was demonstrated that it can enrich and detect Kme1 peptide from peptide mixture containing 5000‐fold more bovine serum albumin tryptic digest. Besides, we extended our approach to profile Kme1 using heavy methyl stable isotope labeling by amino acids in cell culture (hmSILAC) labeled Jurkat T cells and Hela cells. Totally, 29 Kme1 sites on 25 proteins were identified with high confidence and 11 Kme1 sites were identified in both two types cells. This is the first antibody‐free chemical proteomics approach to enrich Kme1 peptides from complex protein digest, and it provides a potential avenue for the analysis of methylome.