TY - JOUR A1 - Lemke, Nora A1 - El-Khatib, Ahmed H. A1 - Tchipilov, Teodor A1 - Jakubowski, N. A1 - Weller, Michael G. A1 - Vogl, Jochen T1 - Procedure providing SI‑traceable results for the calibration of protein standards by sulfur determination and its application on tau N2 - Quantitative proteomics is a growing research area and one of the most important tools in the life sciences. Well-characterized and quantified protein standards are needed to achieve accurate and reliable results. However, only a limited number of sufficiently characterized protein standards are currently available. To fill this gap, a method for traceable protein quantification using sulfur isotope dilution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was developed in this study. Gel filtration and membrane filtration were tested for the separation of non-protein-bound sulfur in the protein solution. Membrane filtration demonstrated a better performance due to the lower workload and the very low sulfur blanks of 11 ng, making it well suited for high-purity proteins such as NIST SRM 927, a bovine serum albumin (BSA). The method development was accomplished with NIST SRM 927e and a commercial avidin. The quantified mass fraction of NIST SRM 927e agreed very well with the certified value and showed similar uncertainties (3.6%) as established methods while requiring less sample preparation and no species-specific standards. Finally, the developed procedure was applied to the tau protein, which is a biomarker for a group of neurodegenerative diseases denoted “tauopathies” including, e.g., Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. For the absolute quantification of tau in the brain of transgenic mice overexpressing human tau, a well-defined calibration standard was needed. Therefore, a pure tau solution was quantified, yielding a protein mass fraction of (0.328 ± 0.036) g/kg, which was confirmed by amino acid analysis. KW - Iinductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry KW - Isotope dilution KW - Quantitative protein analysis KW - Sulfur KW - SI traceability PY - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-545200 VL - 414 SP - 4441 EP - 4455 PB - Springer Verlag AN - OPUS4-54520 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -