Fast and quantitative high-performance liquid chromatography method for the determination of 9-fluorenylmethoxycarbonyl release from solid-phase synthesis resins.

Base catalyzed cleavage of 9-fluorenylmethoxycarbonyl (FMOC) group and subsequent analysis by UV spectrophotometry is a commonly used technique for measuring the loading of functional groups on solid supports. Recent works suggest that using 1,8-diazabicyclo[5,4,0]undec-7-ene (DBU) instead of piperidine makes it possible to use gas chromatography for quantitation, but due to the long deprotection time used, the method is not high-throughput. We observed that the dibenzofulvene released after DBU deprotection could be measured by reversed-phase (RP) HPLC. We have optimized the concentration of DBU as well as the time of the deprotection and coupled with a fast RP-HPLC separation results in a highly reproducible, high-throughput method. The measured loading correspond well with the manufacturer's data on several commercial resins. Using this method we have quantitated the amine loading on several polystyrene resins and we have found that the total amount of functional group can be more than twice the amount of the available ones. We concluded that the differences were the function of the resin loading as well as the level of crosslinking.

Binding affinities of gallotannin analogs with bovine serum albumin: ramifications for polyphenol-protein molecular recognition.

A series of gallotannin analogs were prepared by chemical synthesis, and their affinity for the test-case protein bovine serum albumin was measured by equilibrium dialysis. The structure/activity data obtained suggest that the naturally occurring gallotannins, in fact, do not represent the optimal protein recognition agents amongst polyphenolated templates.

Identification of modification sites in large biomolecules by stable isotope labeling and tandem high resolution mass spectrometry. The active site nucleophile of thiaminase I.

A widely used procedure for site localization of covalent protein modifications involves proteolysis, partial chromatographic separation of the resulting complex mixture, and tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) to identify peptides whose molecular weight (Mr) has been increased appropriately by the modification. As found previously for MS of small molecules, this study shows that protein fragment identification can be greatly simplified by labeling the modification with stable isotopes. Further, the high resolution capabilities of Fourier transform MS make possible the direct identification of CH3/CD3-labeled peptides without chromatographic separation. Although separate Asp-N, Lys-C, and alpha-chymotrypsin digests of thiaminase I (42 kDa) yielded as many as 70 peptides, FTMS identification of the labeled peptide localized the modification site of a mechanism-based inhibitor to Arg101-Lys121, Asp90-Gly122, and Gly107-Tyr119, respectively. The measured mass difference values of the two labels agreed with that expected for CH3/CD3, 3.019 Da, with a standard deviation of 0.005 Da, providing persuasive identity verification. MS/MS fragmentation narrowed the site to Pro109-Phe118 and also caused loss of the derivative with a sulfur atom, uniquely identifying Cys113 as the thiaminase I active-site nucleophile among the 379 amino acids.