From top-down to bottom-up: Time-dependent monitoring of proteolytic protein degradation by LC-MS.

Abstract

The understanding of proteolytic processes includes manifold aspects, ranging from the characterization of proteases and their corresponding substrates to the localization of cleavage sites. The analysis of protease-catalyzed reactions at a single time-point in many cases excludes the identification of intermediate cleavage products of potential biological function. To overcome this problem, proteolysis has to be monitored over time. For that purpose, we established a straight-forward two-step approach. First, Tricine-SDS-PAGE separation of the proteolytic products is applied to survey the proteolytic reaction. In the second step, the reaction mixture is analyzed by an LC-MS set-up. An optimized chromatographic separation coupled to electrospray Orbitrap mass spectrometry allowed the simultaneous monitoring of intact substrates, intermediates and cleavage products of lower molecular weight. The applicability of the strategy was shown on the example of the gastric protease pepsin and its physiologically relevant substrate hen egg white lysozyme, one of the major egg allergens. While lysozyme-derived cysteine-free peptides were cleaved comparatively fast, disulfide bonds protected connected peptides from rapid peptic proteolysis. Two previously identified potential IgE-binding motifs were observed as disulfide-linked cleavage products. In summary, the presented approach is not only ideally suited for the simulation of gastro-intestinal digestion, which is of high interest in food research, but can be transferred to any protease-substrate pair of interest. Furthermore the strategy can be exploited to deduce the effect of post-translational modifications on proteolysis.