Abstract
Soil metaproteomics is a rapidly developing and rather complex field aimed at understanding the functionalities of soil microbial communities. One of the main challenges of such an approach is the availability of a robust and efficient protocol to extract proteins from soil microbes inhabiting this complex matrix. The wide range of soil types and the innumerable variations in soil properties confound this experimental goal. Here we present a detergent based, heat-assisted cellular lysis method coupled with trichloroacetic acid (TCA) precipitation of soil microbial proteins that has been developed in our lab and found to be reasonably robust and unbiased in extracting microbial proteins from a broad range of soils for downstream mass spectrometric characterizations of microbial metabolic activities in natural ecosystems.
