A method is presented to identify and quantify several hundreds of newly synthesized proteins in Escherichia coli upon pulse labeling cells with the methionine analogue azidohomoalanine (azhal). For the first 30 min after inoculation, a methionine-auxotrophic strain grows equally well on azhal as on methionine. Upon a pulse of 15 min and digestion of total protein, azhallabeled peptides are isolated by a retention time shift between two reversed phase chromatographic runs. The retention time shift is induced by a reaction selective for the azido group in labeled peptides using tris(2-carboxyethyl)phosphine. Selectively Knowledge about protein synthesis and degradation rates on a proteome-wide scale is an important requirement for advanced modeling of the kinetics of cellular response networks. Pulse-chase labeling with radiolabeled compounds combined with separation of proteins by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis has already been applied (1, 2). However, this approach has drawbacks, such as difficulties to detect very acidic, basic, or hydrophobic proteins (e.g. membrane proteins). The possible occurrence of more than one protein in a gel spot, masking the relative contribution of each species to the total radioactivity, is another intrinsic difficulty.The use of amino acids labeled with stable isotopes rather than radioisotopes is a solution that is applicable to a mass spectrometry-based proteome-wide approach (3-7). However, this method needs extensive labeling times as the unlabeled bulk of the protein content of the cell will also be detected. Detection of small amounts of labeled, newly synthesized proteins in the presence of large amounts of unlabeled proteins is severely limited by the dynamic range of the mass spectrometer. This requirement for longer labeling times hampers identification and quantitation of transient changes in protein expression following perturbations upon pulse labeling. What is needed is an amino acid analogue that can be distinguished from its natural counterpart, can be used in a gel-free proteomics approach, and will facilitate the isolation of newly synthesized proteins from a large pool of pre-existing proteins. This will enhance identification and increase the dynamic range as well as the sensitivity of detection for transiently expressed proteins.In recent efforts, non-natural amino acids have been used to distinguish between newly synthesized proteins and preFrom ‡Mass Spectrometry of Biomacromolecules and **Molecular Microbial Physiology,