A strategy for the enrichment and characterization of disulfide bond-contained proteins from Chinese cobra (Naja atra) venom

Wei, Yuanqing, et al. “A strategy for the enrichment and characterization of disulfide bond‐contained proteins from Chinese cobra (Naja atra) venom.” Journal of Separation Science 45.4 (2022): 812-823. https://doi.org/10.1002/jssc.202100620

Abstract

A new strategy combined gold-coated magnetic nanocomposites assisted enrichment with mass spectrometry was developed for the characterization of disulfide bond-contained proteins from Chinese cobra (Naja atra) venom. In this work, core-shell nanocomposites were synthesized by the seed-mediated growth method and used for the enrichment of snake venom proteins containing disulfide bonds. A total of 3545 tryptic digested peptides derived from 96 venom proteins in Naja atra venom were identified. The venom proteins comprised 14 toxin families including three-finger toxins, phospholipase A2, snake venom metalloproteinase, cobra venom factor, and so forth. Extra 16 venom proteins were detected exclusively in the nanocomposites set, among which 11 venom proteins were from the three-finger toxins family. In the present study, the proposed simple and efficient protocol replaced the tedious and laborious technologies commonly used for pre-separating crude snake venom, suggesting widely implementation in low-abundance or trace disulfide bond-contained proteins or peptides characterization.