- Article
Background: Bovine serum albumin (BSA) is widely used as a reference material for protein quantification, assessment of mass spectrometry (MS) system performance, enzymatic digestion control, and numerous biochemical applications. Despite its presumed homogeneity, commercial BSA preparations may exhibit substantial molecular heterogeneity affecting analytical performance. Methods: Tryptic digests of four commercial BSA preparations (1 pmol) were characterized by nanoflow high-resolution liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS) and bioinformatic analyses alongside a standard of BSA tryptic peptides (50 fmol) routinely used for MS performance assessment. Results: Our investigation revealed multi-level molecular heterogeneity, encompassing: (i) copurified plasma proteins and, surprisingly, milk-derived proteins across all four analyzed commercial BSA preparations; (ii) non-specific proteolysis and diverse post-translational modifications, including adducts compatible with lysine lactylation or advanced glycation end products (AGEs), such as Nε-carboxyethyllysine; and (iii) genetic variants, including the cataloged Ala190Thr variant found in all four BSA preparations and the previously unreported Gly398Pro variant detected exclusively—yet consistently over a seven-year period—in the commercial BSA tryptic digest reference standard. These sources of heterogeneity influence protein composition, proteolytic behavior, physicochemical properties, and analytical parameters, indicating that commercial BSA preparations are not molecularly equivalent reference materials. Conclusions: Structural, genetic, chemical, and biological variability of BSA reflects the general underlying molecular complexity inherent to biologically derived preparations. Our findings challenge the conventional use of commercial BSA as a universal reference standard and highlight the need for routine molecular characterization of biologically derived reference materials before use in refined proteomic and related analytical applications.
13 November 2026


![SDS-PAGE analysis of BSA preparations loaded at 5 and 1 µg. BSA preparations from: 1: Amersham/GE Health Care; 2: Merck-Sigma; 3: Sigma-Aldrich; 4: VWR. The analysis shows a clear predominance of the expected MW of 66.4 kDa and, for 5 µg BSA, faint bands at lower MW likely arising from proteolytic products of BSA in addition to higher MW of BSA oligomers, in agreement with previous findings [8]. Raw uncropped images of the stain-free and G-250 stained gels can be found in Supplementary Material, Figure S1.](https://mdpi-res.com/proteomes/proteomes-14-00059/article_deploy/html/images/proteomes-14-00059-ag-550.jpg)

