Single Mass Spectrometry Experiment Research Articles

Improved Proteomics-Based Drug Mechanism-of-Action Studies Using 16-Plex Isobaric Mass Tags.

Multiplexed quantitative proteomics enabled complex workflows to study the mechanisms by which small molecule drugs interact with the proteome such as thermal proteome profiling (TPP) or multiplexed proteome dynamics profiling (mPDP). TPP measures changes in protein thermal stability in response to drug treatment and thus informs on direct targets and downstream regulation events, while the mPDP approach enables the discovery of regulated protein synthesis and degradation events caused by small molecules and other perturbations. The isobaric mass tags available for multiplexed proteomics have thus far limited the efficiency and sensitivity by which such experiments could be performed. Here we evaluate a recent generation of 16-plex isobaric mass tags and demonstrate the sensitive and time efficient identification of Staurosporine targets in HepG2 cell extracts by recording full thermal denaturation/aggregation profiles of vehicle and compound treated samples in a single mass spectrometry experiment. In 2D-TPP experiments, isothermal titration over seven concentrations per temperature enabled comprehensive selectivity profiling of Staurosporine with EC50 values for kinase targets tightly matching to the kinobeads gold standard assay. Finally, we demonstrate time and condition-based multiplexing of dynamic SILAC labeling experiments to delineate proteome-wide effects of the molecular glue Indisulam on synthesis and degradation rates.

Peak Filtering, Peak Annotation, and Wildcard Search for Glycoproteomics

AbstractGlycopeptides in peptide or digested protein samples pose a number of analytical and bioinformatics challenges beyond those posed by unmodified peptides or peptides with smaller posttranslational modifications. Exact structural elucidation of glycans is generally beyond the capability of a single mass spectrometry experiment, so a reasonable level of identification for tandem mass spectrometry, taken by several glycopeptide software tools, is that of peptide sequence and glycan composition, meaning the number of monosaccharides of each distinct mass, e.g., HexNAc(2)Hex(5) rather than man5. Even at this level, however, glycopeptide analysis poses challenges: finding glycopeptide spectra when they are a tiny fraction of the total spectra; assigning spectra with unanticipated glycans, not in the initial glycan database; and finding, scoring, and labeling diagnostic peaks in tandem mass spectra. Here, we discuss recent improvements to Byonic, a glycoproteomics search program, that address these three issues. Byonic now supports filtering spectra by m/z peaks, so that the user can limit attention to spectra with diagnostic peaks, e.g., at least two out of three of 204.087 for HexNAc, 274.092 for NeuAc (with water loss), and 366.139 for HexNAc-Hex, all within a set mass tolerance, e.g., ± 0.01 Da. Also, new is glycan “wildcard” search, which allows an unspecified mass within a user-set mass range to be applied to N- or O-linked glycans and enables assignment of spectra with unanticipated glycans. Finally, the next release of Byonic supports user-specified peak annotations from user-defined posttranslational modifications. We demonstrate the utility of these new software features by finding previously unrecognized glycopeptides in publicly available data, including glycosylated neuropeptides from rat brain.

Chemical proteomics reveals target selectivity of clinical Jak inhibitors in human primary cells

Kinobeads are a set of promiscuous kinase inhibitors immobilized on sepharose beads for the comprehensive enrichment of endogenously expressed protein kinases from cell lines and tissues. These beads enable chemoproteomics profiling of kinase inhibitors of interest in dose-dependent competition studies in combination with quantitative mass spectrometry. We present improved bead matrices that capture more than 350 protein kinases and 15 lipid kinases from human cell lysates, respectively. A multiplexing strategy is suggested that enables determination of apparent dissociation constants in a single mass spectrometry experiment. Miniaturization of the procedure enabled determining the target selectivity of the clinical BCR-ABL inhibitor dasatinib in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) lysates from individual donors. Profiling of a set of Jak kinase inhibitors revealed kinase off-targets from nearly all kinase families underpinning the need to profile kinase inhibitors against the kinome. Potently bound off-targets of clinical inhibitors suggest polypharmacology, e.g. through MRCK alpha and beta, which bind to decernotinib with nanomolar affinity.

Streamlined Tandem Mass Tag (SL-TMT) Protocol: An Efficient Strategy for Quantitative (Phospho)proteome Profiling Using Tandem Mass Tag-Synchronous Precursor Selection-MS3.

Mass spectrometry (MS) coupled toisobaric labeling has developed rapidly into a powerful strategy for high-throughput protein quantification. Sample multiplexing and exceptional sensitivity allow for the quantification of tens of thousands of peptides and, by inference, thousands of proteins from multiple samples in a single MS experiment. Accurate quantification demands a consistent and robust sample-preparation strategy. Here, we present a detailed workflow for SPS-MS3-based quantitative abundance profiling of tandem mass tag (TMT)-labeled proteins and phosphopeptides that we have named the streamlined (SL)-TMT protocol. We describe a universally applicable strategy that requires minimal individual sample processing and permits the seamless addition of a phosphopeptide enrichment step ("mini-phos") with little deviation from the deep proteome analysis. To showcase our workflow, we profile the proteome of wild-type Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast grown with either glucose or pyruvate as the carbon source. Here, we have established a streamlined TMT protocol that enables deep proteome and medium-scale phosphoproteome analysis.

Infrared Laser Activation of Soluble and Membrane Protein Assemblies in the Gas Phase.

Collision-induced dissociation (CID) is the dominant method for probing intact macromolecular complexes in the gas phase by means of mass spectrometry (MS). The energy obtained from collisional activation is dependent on the charge state of the ion and the pressures and potentials within the instrument: these factors limit CID capability. Activation by infrared (IR) laser radiation offers an attractive alternative as the radiation energy absorbed by the ions is charge-state-independent and the intensity and time scale of activation is controlled by a laser source external to the mass spectrometer. Here we implement and apply IR activation, in different irradiation regimes, to study both soluble and membrane protein assemblies. We show that IR activation using high-intensity pulsed lasers is faster than collisional and radiative cooling and requires much lower energy than continuous IR irradiation. We demonstrate that IR activation is an effective means for studying membrane protein assemblies, and liberate an intact V-type ATPase complex from detergent micelles, a result that cannot be achieved by means of CID using standard collision energies. Notably, we find that IR activation can be sufficiently soft to retain specific lipids bound to the complex. We further demonstrate that, by applying a combination of collisional activation, mass selection, and IR activation of the liberated complex, we can elucidate subunit stoichiometry and the masses of specifically bound lipids in a single MS experiment.

A GLOBAL (PHOSPHO)PROTEOMIC WORKFLOW SUITABLE FOR ANALYSIS OF FRESH/FROZEN BRAIN TISSUE IN TRANSGENIC MODELS OF NEURODEGENERATION

Many neurodegenerative diseases are characterised by abnormal posttranslational modification (PTM) of one or more proteins leading to their aggregation and, by mechanisms not yet fully understood, ultimately to neuronal cell death. One of the most common forms of pathological PTM is phosphorylation, with phosphorylated forms of tau (AD), TDP-43 (ALS, FTLD) and alpha-synuclein (PD) all associated with disease, whereas decreased phosphorylation on huntingtin (HD) is thought to be protective. The role of cell signalling pathways, mostly regulated by kinase/phosphatase cascades is also increasingly being recognised as modulating key aspects of neurodegeneration such as re-activation of cell cycle in neuronal cells and activation of immune cells such as microglia and astrocytes. Accordingly, there is a strong rationale to develop and apply global phosphorylation profiling to neuronal cell cultures and brain tissues used in neurodegenerative disease research. We have recently reported SysQuant, a global phosphoproteomic workflow that employs isobaric Tandem Mass Tags (TMT) and differential chromatography to measure fractions of both enriched phosphopeptides and the un-enriched nonphosphorylated peptides derived from tryptic digestion of tumour cell lysates of up to 10 samples in a single mass spectrometry experiment(1). We have now applied SysQuant to frozen brain tissue from a mouse model of human tauopathy (TMHT Mouse, QPS Austria) treated with vehicle or vehicle + kinase inhibitors, and we are able to demonstrate significant, potentially protective effects on the phosphorylation of aggregating proteins, as well as regulation of key pathways such as glycolysis/gluconeogenesis, calcium signalling, oxidative phosphorylation, citrate cycle along with all major neurodegenerative KEGG pathways. By using a TMT 10plex labelling strategy we were able to generate a detailed, quantitative phosphoproteomic map for 3 x 3 x 3 animals treated with vehicle or one of two kinase inhibitors from hippocampus, cortex and rest of brain regions in approximately 8 weeks. Data from the hippocampus is presented here.

Charge State Determination of Peptide Tandem Mass Spectra Using Support Vector Machine (SVM)

A single mass spectrometry experiment could produce hundreds of thousands of tandem mass spectra. Several search engines have been developed to interpret tandem mass spectra. All search engines need to determine the masses of peptide ions from their mass/charge ratios. Unfortunately, mass spectrometers do not detect the charges of ions. A current strategy is to search candidate peptides multiple times, once for each possible charge state (typically +2 or +3 ). However, this strategy not only wastes the search time, but also increases the risk of false positive peptide identification. This paper aims at discriminating doubly charged spectra from triply charged ones. Twenty-eight features are introduced to describe the discriminant characteristics of doubly charged and triply charged spectra. The support vector machine (SVM) technique is used to train the classifier on these 28 features. To verify the proposed method, computational experiments are conducted on two types of datasets: ISB dataset generated from the low-resolution ion-trap instrument and TOV dataset generated from the high-resolution quadrupole-time-of-flight instrument. For each type of dataset, the SVM-based classifiers are trained and tested on 20 randomly sampled subdatasets. The results show that the proposed method reaches average correct rates of 95% and 93% to discriminate doubly charged spectra from triply charged ones for the low-resolution ISB dataset and the high-resolution TOV dataset, respectively.

One-Pot Shotgun Quantitative Mass Spectrometry Characterization of Histones

Despite increasing applications of mass spectrometry (MS) to characterize post-translational modifications (PTMs) on histone proteins, most existing protocols are not properly suited to robustly measure them in a high-throughput quantitative manner. In this work, we expand on current protocols and describe improved methods for quantitative Bottom Up characterization of histones and their PTMs with comparable sensitivity but much higher throughput than standard MS approaches. This is accomplished by first bypassing off-line fractionation of histone proteins and working directly with total histones from a typical nuclei acid extraction. Next, using a chemical derivatization procedure that is combined with stable-isotope labeling in a two-step process, we can quantitatively compare samples using nanoLC-MS/MS. We show that our method can successfully detect 17 combined H2A/H2B variants and over 25 combined histone H3 and H4 PTMs in a single MS experiment. We test our method by quantifying differentially expressed histone PTMs from wild-type yeast and a methyltransferase knockout strain. This improved methodology establishes that time and sample consuming off-line HPLC or SDS-PAGE purification of individual histone variants prior to MS interrogation as commonly performed is not strictly required. Our protocol significantly streamlines the analysis of histone PTMs and will allow for studies of differentially expressed PTMs between multiple samples during biologically relevant processes in a rapid and quantitative fashion.

Comparison of HPLC/ESI-FTICR MS Versus MALDI-TOF/TOF MS for Glycopeptide Analysis of a Highly Glycosylated HIV Envelope Glycoprotein

Defining the structures and locations of the glycans attached on secreted proteins and virus envelope proteins is important in understanding how glycosylation affects their biological properties. Glycopeptide mass spectrometry (MS)-based analysis is a very powerful, emerging approach to characterize glycoproteins, in which glycosylation sites and the corresponding glycan structures are elucidated in a single MS experiment. However, to date there is not a consensus regarding which mass spectrometric platform provides the best glycosylation coverage information. Herein, we employ two of the most widely used MS approaches, online high performance liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (HPLC/ESI-MS) and offline HPLC followed by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS), to determine which of the two approaches provides the best glycosylation coverage information of a complex glycoprotein, the group M consensus HIV-1 envelope, CON-S gp140DeltaCFI, which has 31 potential glycosylation sites. Our results highlight differences in the informational content obtained between the two methods such as the overall number of glycosylation sites detected, the numbers of N-linked glycans present at each site, and the type of confirmatory information obtained about the glycopeptide using MS/MS experiments. The two approaches are quite complementary, both in their coverage of glycopeptides and in the information they provide in MS/MS experiments. The information in this study contributes to the field of mass spectrometry by demonstrating the strengths and limitations of two widely used MS platforms in glycoprotein analysis.

Characterization of Metal and Nucleotide Liganded Forms of Adenylate Kinase by Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry

Complexes of adenylate kinase fromEscherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis,andBacillus stearothermophiluswith the bisubstrate nucleotide analogP1,P5-di(adenosine 5′)-pentaphosphate and with metal ions (Zn2+and/or Mg2+) were analyzed by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry.P1,P5-di(adenosine 5′)-pentaphosphate·adenylate kinase complex was detected in the positive mode at pH as low as 3.8. Binding of nucleotide to adenylate kinase stabilizes the overall structure of the protein and preserves the Zn2+chelated form of the enzyme from the gram-positive organisms. In this way, it is possible in a single mass spectrometry experiment to screen metal-chelating adenylate kinases, without use of radioactively labeled compounds. Binding of Mg2+to enzyme viaP1,P5-di(adenosine 5′)-pentaphosphate was also demonstrated by mass spectrometry. Although no amino acid side chain in adenylate kinase is supposed to interact with Mg2+, Asp93in porcine muscle cytosolic enzyme, equivalent to Asp84in theE. coliadenylate kinase, was proposed to stabilize the nucleotide·Mg2+complex via water molecules.