Novel functionalized nanomaterials for the effective enrichment of proteins and peptides with post-translational modifications.

Low abundance proteins/peptides usually suffer strong interference with highly abundant proteins/peptides as well as other contaminants, resulting in low ionization efficiency in MS analysis. Hence, the enrichment and separation of proteins/peptides from complex mixtures are of great value to their successful identification. In this review we present an overview of the application of different nanocomposites for the specific enrichment of peptides/proteins with post-translational modifications (PTMs), such as phosphorylation and glycosylation. Furthermore, examples of the selective enrichment of cysteine-containing peptides, histidine-tagged proteins and the isolation of N-terminal peptides will be analyzed.