Project description:UVPD was implemented on an Orbitrap Q-Exactive plus equipped with a ESI/EP-MALDI. UVPD of MALDI generated ions was benchmarked against MALDI-ISD, MALDI-HCD and ESI-UVPD. MALDI UVPD outperformed MALDI HCD and ISD efficiently sequencing small proteins ions.
Project description:Crosslinking mass spectrometry (XL-MS) has become a key technique for investigating protein-protein interactions and the architecture of biological systems. This study compares the Orbitrap Astral and Eclipse mass spectrometers in XL-MS workflows, emphasizing their performance in detecting low-abundance crosslinked peptides. Using Cas9 crosslinked with PhoX and DSSO, the Astral demonstrated over 40% higher crosslink identifications due to its superior ion transmission and sensitivity, enabled by its multi-reflection time-of-flight analyzer. Single higher-energy collisional dissociation (HCD) fragmentation was more effective than stepped HCD on the Astral, while the Eclipse showed similar results for both methods. Gradient optimization revealed that extended separation times improved crosslink identifications. These findings highlight the critical role of instrumentation and workflow optimization in advancing XL-MS for structural proteomics.
Project description:The project aimed to identify interaction sites of RNF168 with the Nucleosomes. RNF168 interaction with the Nucleosome was probed by BS3 crosslinking to support structure modeling based on NMR and mutagenesis experiments
Project description:Objective: ADP-ribosylation is a post-translational modification that plays an important role in cellular processes. Our previous work implemented multiple gas-phase separation strategies (e.g., FAIMS) and in-source CID on the quadrupole-Orbitrap (Exploris 480) to increase the yield and acceptor site confidence scores of HCD-dependent ADP-ribosyl (ADPr) peptide identifications. We evaluated whether FAIMS coupled on the quadruple-ion trap-Orbitrap (Fusion Lumos) also improves EThcD-dependent ADP-ribosyl peptide sequencing. Methods: ADPr peptides derived from the human macrophage-like cell line THP-1 (THP-1-Mφ) were analyzed on the Lumos fronted with a FAIMS Pro and EASY-Spray Source, coupled to an Easy-nLC1200 HPLC pump. Gas-phase segmentation (GPS) for the MS1 scan range, and single and multiple combined compensation voltages (CVs) for FAIMS were applied for HCD and EThcD properties. ADP-ribosyl peptide spectra were analyzed using Proteome Discoverer 2.5. The ptmRS function was used for calculating ADP-ribosyl site probabilities. Results: We evaluated the number of ADPr and non-ADPr PSMs using ADPr peptides pooled from PBS and IFN-γ treated THP-1-Mφ across a range of CVs (-40V to -85V) using FAIMS with HCD and EThcD. The peak CVs for ADPr and non-ADPr PSMs were shifted for HCD, while they represented similar distributions for EThcD. The net number of unique ADPr and non-ADPr peptides across the CVs increased by 3.2- and 3.8-fold more respectively for HCD, and 2.0- and 3.6-fold respectively for EThcD, compared to no FAIMS. We then tested 4 distinct MS methods: (method 1: m/z 400-900, method 2: m/z 400-655 and m/z 650-900, method 3: three CVs combination (-50V, -60V, -70V) with m/z 400-900, method 4: three different acquisitions using distinct CVs (-50V, -60V, -70V) with m/z 400-900) for identifying the maximum number of ADPr acceptor sites with high (>95%) confidence using EThcD. Method 4 was best with 562 ADPr PSMs, but only 54% were high confidence ADPr sites. Due to sample volume limitation, we used method 3 for analyzing ADPr peptides enriched from THP-1-Mφ treated with PBS or IFN-γ separately. We identified 324 and 196 unique ADPr peptides from PBS and IFN-γ, of which 257 and 139 unique acceptor sites were identified with high confidence. The most frequent ADPr acceptor site was lysine (>90%), followed by serine. Conclusion: Our data demonstrated that while FAIMS is valuable for EThcD-dependent sequencing of ADPr peptides, the gains are less for ADPr peptides or contaminant non-ADPr peptides when using HCD.
Project description:Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) –-tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) has been documented as a useful tool for top-down proteomics (TDP). However, CZE-MS/MS-based TDP typically has limited backbone cleavage coverage for identified proteoforms due to the use of traditional collision-based fragmentation methods (i.e., higher-energy collisional dissociation, HCD). Here, for the first time, we coupled CZE to a high-end Orbitrap Ascend mass spectrometer to investigate the performance of collision, electron, and photon-based fragmentation methods and their combinations for boosting the backbone cleavage coverage of proteoforms during the electrophoretic timescale using a standard protein mixture covering a mass range of about 10-70 kDa. CZE-MS achieved reproducible measurement of six proteins, including three insulin-like growth factor (IGF) proteoforms with different modifications. Systematic investigations of HCD, electron-transfer dissociation (ETD), electron-transfer/HCD (EThcD), and ultraviolet photodissociation (UVPD) during CZE-MS/MS analysis revealed distinct yet complementary fragmentation characteristics. ETD, EThcD, and UVPD, in general, provided higher backbone cleavage coverage than HCD. The integration of HCD, ETD, EThcD, and UVPD data offered a 74% and 98% sequence coverage for carbonic anhydrase (a 30-kDa protein) and thioredoxin (a 12-kDa protein), which is 185% and 100% higher than that produced by HCD alone. Adding internal fragments further boosted the backbone cleavage coverage substantially, for example, from 74% to 94% for 30-kDa carbonic anhydrase, and from 35% to 94% for 50-kDa Protein AG. The results demonstrate the capability of CZE-MS/MS with the integration of various fragmentation techniques for comprehensive characterization of proteoforms in a wide mass range.
Project description:In this study we compared three different fragmentation techniques and two combined fragmentation schemes available on a novel tribrid mass spectrometer (Orbitrap Fusion Lumos, Themro Fisher Scientific) CID, HCD, ETD, ETD with supplemental CID (ETciD) and ETD with supplemental HCD (EThcD) on cross-linked peptides obtained by tryptic cleavage of SDA-cross-linked Human Serum Albumin (HSA). The three-dimensional structure of HSA has been resolved by X-ray crystallography [35] and is used as ground-truth to evaluate the identification results. Right choice of the fragmentation method allows increasing the number of identified linkage sites, increasing the sequence coverage of both linked peptides thereby reducing the second peptide problem, and increasing the precision of cross-link site calling.