Digestion and depletion of abundant proteins improves proteomic coverage

Two major challenges in proteomics are the large number of proteins and their broad dynamic range within the cell. We exploited the abundance-dependent Michaelis-Menten kinetics of trypsin digestion to selectively digest and deplete abundant proteins with a method we call DigDeAPr. We validated the depletion mechanism with known yeast protein abundances and observed greater than 3-fold improvement in low abundance human protein identification and quantitation metrics. This methodology should be broadly applicable to many organisms, proteases, and proteomic pipelines.