Chloroplast isolation and affinity chromatography for enrichment of low-abundant proteins in complex proteomes

Detailed knowledge of the proteome is crucial to advance the biological sciences. Low-abundant proteins are of particular interest to many biologists as they include, for example those proteins involved in signal transduction. Recent technological advances resulted in a tremendous increase in protein identification sensitivity by mass spectrometry (MS). However, the dynamic range in protein abundance still forms a fundamental problem that limits the detection of low-abundant proteins in complex proteomes. These proteins will typically escape detection in shotgun MS experiments due to the presence of other proteins at an abundance several-fold higher in order of magnitude. Therefore, specific enrichment strategies are required to overcome this technical limitation of MS-based protein discovery. We have searched for novel signal transduction proteins, more specifically kinases and calcium-binding proteins, and here we describe different approaches for enrichment of these low-abundant proteins from isolated chloroplasts from pea and Arabidopsis for subsequent proteomic analysis by MS. These approaches could be extended to include other signal transduction proteins and target different organelles.