Determining and characterizing hapten loads for carrier proteins by MALDI-TOF MS and MALDI-TOF/RTOF MS

The increasing number of bioconjugates used for bioanalytical purposes and in pharmaceutical industries has led to an increasing demand for robust quality control of products derived from covalently linking small molecules to proteins. Here we report, for the first time, a matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight (TOF)-based method to determine the quantity and location of the hapten zearalenone (ZEN) introduced to the carrier protein conalbumin (Con). This bioconjugate is of special interest because of its application in lateral flow immunoassays commercially available for fast testing of food and feed for the presence of ZEN, a common contaminant of all major cereal grains worldwide. Mass spectrometry (MS) analysis of the intact protein turned out to be highly reproducible allowing for the determination of the average hapten load of the carrier protein. In that way an easy and fast method to screen for changes in ZEN load after bioconjugate synthesis was established. For a more detailed hapten load characterization, measurements at the peptide level were of importance. Systematic studies, implementing post-source decay (PSD) and high- and low-energy collision-induced dissociation (CID), showed characteristic fragmentation pattern for three model peptides carrying between one and three lysines (the primary target for the ZEN modification) besides other, less obvious modification sites (serine, arginine and the N-terminus). By this, indicative reporter ions (m/z 203 and 316) and neutral losses (Δm/z 373 and 317) for the ZEN modification in general, plus immonium ions (m/z 87, 142 and 159) for the lysine modification in particular were identified. Based on these findings, proteolytic peptides, tentatively assigned to be modified, were unequivocally confirmed to be affected by bioconjugation. For a protein carrying on average only 2-3 modifications per molecule 29 Lys out of 59 potential modifications sites were actually modified. Considerations taking the protein structure into account showed that the affected Lys were predominantly located on the protein's surface.