Practical Effects of Intramolecular Hydrogen Rearrangement in Electron Transfer Dissociation-Based Proteomics

J Am Soc Mass Spectrom. 2022 Jan 5;33(1):100-110. doi: 10.1021/jasms.1c00284. Epub 2021 Dec 7.

Abstract

Ion-ion reactions are valuable tools in mass-spectrometry-based peptide and protein sequencing. To boost the generation of sequence-informative fragment ions from low charge-density precursors, supplemental activation methods, via vibrational and photoactivation, have become widely adopted. However, long-lived radical peptide cations undergo intramolecular hydrogen atom transfer from c-type ions to z-type ions. Here we investigate the degree of hydrogen transfer for thousands of unique peptide cations where electron transfer dissociation (ETD) was performed and was followed by beam-type collisional activation (EThcD), resonant collisional activation (ETcaD), or concurrent infrared photoirradiation (AI-ETD). We report on the precursor charge density and the local amino acid environment surrounding bond cleavage to illustrate the effects of intramolecular hydrogen atom transfer for various precursor ions. Over 30% of fragments from EThcD spectra comprise distorted isotopic distributions, whereas over 20% of fragments from ETcaD have distorted distributions and less than 15% of fragments derived from ETD and AI-ETD reveal distorted isotopic distributions. Both ETcaD and EThcD give a relatively high degree of hydrogen migration, especially when D, G, N, S, and T residues were directly C-terminal to the cleavage site. Whereas all postactivation methods boost the number of c- and z-type fragment ions detected, the collision-based approaches produce higher rates of hydrogen migration, yielding fewer spectral identifications when only c- and z-type ions are considered. Understanding hydrogen rearrangement between c- and z-type ions will facilitate better spectral interpretation.

MeSH terms

  • Cell Line
  • Chromatography, Liquid
  • Electrons*
  • Humans
  • Hydrogen / chemistry*
  • Peptide Fragments / analysis
  • Peptide Fragments / chemistry
  • Peptide Fragments / metabolism
  • Proteins / analysis
  • Proteins / chemistry*
  • Proteins / metabolism
  • Proteomics / methods*
  • Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Substances

  • Peptide Fragments
  • Proteins
  • Hydrogen