Project description:Label-free protein sequencing is critically enabled by bottom-up, mass spectrometry-based proteomics workflows. Applications such as antibody sequencing or antigen discovery require de novo reconstruction of peptide and protein sequences. While trypsin has long served as the gold-standard protease in proteomics, its restricted C-terminal cleavage specificity constrains peptide diversity, particularly limiting coverage in antibody hypervariable complementarity-determining regions (CDRs). As a result, current workflows yield sparse reads and sequence gaps. Although multi-protease and hybrid-fragmentation strategies can notably improve coverage, they add complexity and compromise scalability and reproducibility. Here, we present a novel approach using HyperThermoacidic Archaeal (HTA) proteases Krakatoa or Vesuvius as powerful single-enzyme solutions for de novo antibody sequencing. Each protease generated over five times more unique peptide reads than trypsin or chymotrypsin with high redundancy across CDRs. Combined with EAciD fragmentation on a ZenoTOF 7600 system, this workflow enabled complete, unambiguous antibody sequencing. Despite most de novo tools being optimized for CID/HCD-tryptic data, analysis using PEAKS/DeepNovo and Stitch softwares showed that HTA-Proteases yielded up to fourfold higher alignment scores and fewer sequence mistakes across variable regions. Redundant reads increased more than threefold compared to standard proteases, boosting confidence in amino acid assignment and reducing ambiguity in final assemblies. Our alternative HTA-EAciD approach offers short digestion times, eliminates extensive cleanup, and enables analysis in a single LC-MS/MS run. This single-protease strategy delivers sequencing performance comparable to multi-enzyme workflows, providing a scalable, efficient, and highly confident approach for de novo sequencing in antibody discovery and beyond.
Project description:Ribosomes translate mRNA into protein. Despite divergence in ribosome structure over the course of evolution, the catalytic site, known as the peptidyl transferase center (PTC), is thought to be nearly universally conserved. Here, we identify clades of archaea that have highly divergent ribosomal RNA sequences in the PTC. To understand how these PTC sequences fold, we determined cryo-EM structures of the 70S and 50S ribosomes to 2.4 Å and 2 Å, respectively, from the hyperthermophilic archaeon Pyrobaculum calidifontis. PTC sequence variation leads to the rearrangement of key base triples and differences between archaeal and bacterial ribosomal proteins enable sequence variation in archaeal PTCs. Finally, we identify a previously undescribed archaeal ribosome hibernation factor, Dri, that differs from known bacterial and eukaryotic hibernation factors and is found in multiple archaeal phyla. Overall, this work identifies factors that regulate ribosome function in archaea and reveals a larger diversity of the most ancient sequences in the ribosome
Project description:Ammonia-oxidizing archaeal (AOA) amoA diversity and relative abundance in Gulf of Mexico sediments (0-2 cm) were investigated using a functional gene microarray; a two color array with a universal internal standard