Toward Absolute Quantification of Soluble Proteins via Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy: Total Protein Concentration in Blood Plasma

For absolute protein quantification using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, we considered proteins as homopolymers and effective amino acid (AA) residues (AAR(Eff)) as monomer units. For diverse classes of proteins, we determined the AAR(Eff) molecular weight as 111.5 +/- 3.2 Da and the number of hydrogens per AA as 7.8 +/- 0.2. Their ratio of 14.3 +/- 0.3 (g/LP)/(mol/LH) remains constant across various protein classes and is equivalent to Kjeldahl's nitrogen-to-protein conversion constant of 5.78 +/- 0.29 gN/gP. By analogy to the Kjeldahl method, we suggest that the total integral of a H-1 NMR solution protein spectrum could be used for total protein quantification. We synthesized low-resolution protein spectra from the weighted sums of individual AA spectra and compared them with experimental spectra. In the methyl region, the ratio of the protein mass to the total number of protons in the synthetic spectra (corrected for the chemical shift mismatch) was similar to 1 (mg/mL)/mM, which agrees with an earlier reported experimental ratio for urine (1.05 +/- 0.06 (mg/mL)/mM). For human blood plasma, in the methyl region, we found empirical ratios of 1.115 +/- 0.006 (mg/mL)/mM (using 96 patient samples) and 1.121 +/- 0.011 (mg/mL)/mM for the NIST plasma standard. This numerical agreement points to universal conversion constants, i.e., protein mixtures with unknown compositions could be quantified without the need for calibration standards by measuring the millimolar proton concentration within the methyl region of the NMR spectrum using the same conversion constant.