Waters PeptideWorks Tryptic Protein Digestion Kits

Waters has launched its PeptideWorks Tryptic Protein Digestion Kits to provide biopharma scientists with a comprehensive, automatable solution for rapid sample preparation for peptide mapping. By reducing missed cleavages and autolysis peaks, which can complicate data processing, the kits should bolster digestion performance and provide baselines free from noise.

The kits deliver high-efficiency peptide mapping, with quick sample preparation in under 2.5 h (vs standard ‘home-brew’ methods of 6–8 h), allowing quick and confident decisions during critical data analysis for protein characterisation. ‘Home-brew’ is the most common protocol for protein digestion, which includes sourcing reagents individualised from various manufacturers; this often results in long and complicated development times.

The kits offer clean baselines that minimise the number of unmatched peaks, via under-digestion, over-digestion (non-specific cleavages) or digestion of the enzyme itself. They achieve automatable desalting with fit-for-purpose Sep-Pak SEC Desalting Cartridges for reproducible and efficient salt removal with ≥80% protein recoveries.

The product alleviates the cumbersome steps of desalting (extracting salt content and denaturant) by automating both the desalting step and the entire peptide mapping sample preparation with one comprehensive kit for manual or automated workflows and eliminates the need to source multiple reagents. It is fully automated to provide reproducible results, making for easy method transfer from lab to lab.

The kits offer scientists working in discovery or development and characterisation within small to large biopharma companies, CROs and CDMOs a complete peptide mapping workflow. Complete kits cover sample preparation for the separation and detection on the Waters BioAccord System with ACQUITY Premier LC System coupled with data processing on waters_connect Software with Peptide Mapping and Peptide MAM apps.

The kit offers five flexible formats to run up to 96 samples: three kits for denaturation, reduction, alkylation, desalting and digestion, which includes starter kits (including ACQUITY Premier Peptide CSH C18 Column) and refill kits; and two kits without denaturation, reduction and alkylation, which includes starter kits and refill kits with desalting and digestion.

The kits address the challenge of long, irreproducible sample preparation of peptide mapping across all protein digestion sample preparation characterisation workflows, with high digestion efficiency within biopharmaceutical R&D.