Mass spectrometry of protein modifications by reactive oxygen and nitrogen species

The modification of proteins by reactive oxygen and nitrogen species plays an important role in various biologic processes involving protein activation and inactivation, protein translocation and turnover during signal transduction, stress response, proliferation, and apoptosis. Recent advances in protein and peptide separation and mass spectrometry provide increasingly sophisticated tools for the quantitative analysis of such protein modifications, which are absolutely necessary for their correlation with biologic phenomena. The present review focuses specifically on the qualitative and quantitative mass spectrometric analysis of the most common protein modifications caused by reactive oxygen and nitrogen species in vivo and in vitro and details a case study on a membrane protein the sarco/endoplasmic reticulum Ca-ATPase (SERCA).