“…Phosphorylation is a PTM that is particularly challenging, as it is present in lowstoichiometry amounts in samples, therefore enrichment techniques are usually required prior to mass spectrometry analysis, as reviewed by Leitner et al (2011). Presently, there are several techniques effective and available for this purpose, namely IMAC, titanium dioxide, among others, and recently a highly efficient new enrichment technique using lathanum ions for the precipitation of this type of modified peptides was developed (Pink et al, 2011). The advantage of the lanthanum enrichment is that it is based on a single step precipitation and phosphoproteins can be isolated from frozen tissue or cells, after cell lysis, using several buffer systems compatible with tandem mass spectrometry analysis.…”