Immobilization of trypsin on graphene oxide for microwave-assisted on-plate proteolysis combined with MALDI-MS analysis

With an ultra-high surface area and abundant functional groups, graphene oxide (GO) provides an ideal substrate for the immobilization of trypsin. We demonstrated that trypsin could be immobilized on GO sheets assisted by polymers as molecular spacers to maintain the activity of the enzyme. And with the trypsin-linked GO as the enzyme immobilization probe, a novel microwave-assisted on-plate digestion method has been developed with subsequent analysis by MALDI-MS. The feasibility and performance of the digestion approach were demonstrated by the proteolysis of standard proteins. The results show that this novel approach substantially accelerated proteolysis and reduced the time required for traditional procedures involving on-plate enzymatic digestion and sample preparation prior to MALDI-MS analysis. The novel digestion approach is simple and efficient, offering great promise for high throughput protein identification.