Pyrylium
salts are considered efficient chemical tags for amino
groups. However, the apparent steric selectivity of pyrylium salts
limits their application in the field of chemical labeling, especially
during the labeling of sterically hindered compounds like amino acids,
peptides, and proteins. Herein, we have investigated the effects of
the α-substitution of pyrylium salts on their reactivity. We
have also investigated the mechanism of nucleophilic reactions with
pyrylium salts and further proposed that the reactivity of pyrylium
salts mainly depends on the position and type of their substituents.
A series of pyrylium salts were synthesized, and a highly active α-monosubstituted
pyrylium salt, 2,4,5-triphenylpyrylium, was developed for efficient
chemical labeling. All of the 15 amino acids studied were efficiently
labeled under optimized reaction conditions. The 2,4,5-triphenylpyrylium
salt was highly efficient in comparison to the previously reported
2,4,6-triphenylpyrylium salt developed for lysine-specific modifications.
Furthermore, we successfully used 2,4,5-triphenylpyrylium salt for
the hydrophobic labeling of peptides and protein hydrolysates. The
most striking observation was that the ionization efficiency of short-chain
multilabeled peptides in mixed samples, after derivatization, increased
by up to 60 times. The increase in ionization efficiency gradually
decreased with increasing peptide chain length. During the “soft”
collision-induced dissociation (CID) process, the peptide was tagged
at the N-terminus with 2,4,5-triphenylpyrylium, producing abundant
a-type ions and b-type ions (Δ = 28), which eases the peptide
resequencing process and assists in cracking the peptide codes. Moreover,
2,4,5-triphenylpyrylium has been utilized for the proteomic analysis
of HeLa cell digests. In addition, 215 additional proteins were identified
in the labeled products and the coverage of most proteins was improved.