Evaluation of Parameters for Confident Phosphorylation Site Localization Using an Orbitrap Fusion Tribrid Mass Spectrometer

Confident identification of sites of protein phosphorylation by mass spectrometry (MS) is essential to advance understanding of phosphorylation-mediated signaling events. However, the development of novel instrumentation requires that methods for MS data acquisition and its interrogation be evaluated and optimized for high-throughput phosphoproteomics. Here we compare and contrast eight MS acquisition methods on the novel tribrid Orbitrap Fusion MS platform using both a synthetic phosphopeptide library and a complex phosphopeptide-enriched cell lysate. In addition to evaluating multiple fragmentation regimes (HCD, EThcD, and neutral-loss-triggered ET­(ca/hc)­D) and analyzers for MS/MS (orbitrap (OT) versus ion trap (IT)), we also compare two commonly used bioinformatics platforms, Andromeda with PTM-score, and MASCOT with <i>ptmRS</i> for confident phosphopeptide identification and, crucially, phosphosite localization. Our findings demonstrate that optimal phosphosite identification is achieved using HCD fragmentation and high-resolution orbitrap-based MS/MS analysis, employing MASCOT/<i>ptmRS</i> for data interrogation. Although EThcD is optimal for confident site localization for a given PSM, the increased duty cycle compared with HCD compromises the numbers of phosphosites identified. Finally, our data highlight that a charge-state-dependent fragmentation regime and a multiple algorithm search strategy are likely to be of benefit for confident large-scale phosphosite localization

QconCAT Standard for Calibration of Ion Mobility-Mass Spectrometry Systems

Ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) is a useful technique for determining information about analyte ion conformation in addition to mass/charge ratio. The physical principles that govern the mobility of an ion through a gas in the presence of a uniform electric field are well understood, enabling rotationally averaged collision cross sections (Ω) to be directly calculated from measured drift times under well-defined experimental conditions. However, such “first principle” calculations are not straightforward for Traveling Wave (T-Wave) mobility separations due to the range of factors that influence ion motion through the mobility cell. If collision cross section information is required from T-Wave mobility separations, then calibration of the instruments using known standards is essential for each set of experimental conditions. To facilitate such calibration, we have designed and generated an artificial protein based on the QconCAT technology, QCAL-IM, which upon proteolysis can be used as a universal ion mobility calibration standard. This single unique standard enables empirical calculation of peptide ion collision cross sections from the drift time on a T-Wave mobility instrument

Analysis of Intrinsic Peptide Detectability via Integrated Label-Free and SRM-Based Absolute Quantitative Proteomics

Quantitative mass spectrometry-based proteomics of complex biological samples remains challenging in part due to the variability and charge competition arising during electrospray ionization (ESI) of peptides and the subsequent transfer and detection of ions. These issues preclude direct quantification from signal intensity alone in the absence of a standard. A deeper understanding of the governing principles of peptide ionization and exploitation of the inherent ionization and detection parameters of individual peptides is thus of great value. Here, using the yeast proteome as a model system, we establish the concept of peptide F-factor as a measure of detectability, closely related to ionization efficiency. F-factor is calculated by normalizing peptide precursor ion intensity by absolute abundance of the parent protein. We investigated F-factor characteristics in different shotgun proteomics experiments, including across multiple ESI-based LC–MS platforms. We show that F-factors mirror previously observed physicochemical predictors as peptide detectability but demonstrate a nonlinear relationship between hydrophobicity and peptide detectability. Similarly, we use F-factors to show how peptide ion coelution adversely affects detectability and ionization. We suggest that F-factors have great utility for understanding peptide detectability and gas-phase ion chemistry in complex peptide mixtures, selection of surrogate peptides in targeted MS studies, and for calibration of peptide ion signal in label-free workflows. Data are available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD003472