Affinity and chemical enrichment strategies for mapping low-abundance protein modifications and protein-interaction networks.

Protein post-translational modifications and protein interactions are the central research areas in mass-spectrometry-based proteomics. Protein post-translational modifications affect protein structures, stabilities, activities, and all cellular processes are achieved by interactions among proteins and protein complexes. With the continuing advancements of mass spectrometry instrumentations of better sensitivity, speed, and performance, selective enrichment of modifications/interactions of interest from complex cellular matrices during the sample preparation has become the overwhelming bottleneck in the proteomics workflow.