Direct glycan structure determination of intact N-linked glycopeptides by low-energy collision-induced dissociation tandem mass spectrometry and predicted spectral library searching

• A new computational tool for intact N-glycopeptide analysis.
• Integrated into an open-source and full-feature proteomics data analysis package.
• Site-specific N-glycosylation profiling of human transferrin.
• First report for site-specific glycoform profiling of human acetylcholinesterase.

Intact glycopeptide MS analysis to reveal site-specific protein glycosylation is an important frontier of proteomics. However, computational tools for analyzing MS/MS spectra of intact glycopeptides are still limited and not well-integrated into existing workflows. In this work, a new computational tool which combines the spectral library building/searching tool, SpectraST (Lam et al. Nat. Methods2008, 5, 873–875), and the glycopeptide fragmentation prediction tool, MassAnalyzer (Zhang et al. Anal. Chem.2010, 82, 10194–10202) for intact glycopeptide analysis has been developed. Specifically, this tool enables the determination of the glycan structure directly from low-energy collision-induced dissociation (CID) spectra of intact glycopeptides. Given a list of possible glycopeptide sequences as input, a sample-specific spectral library of MassAnalyzer-predicted spectra is built using SpectraST. Glycan identification from CID spectra is achieved by spectral library searching against this library, in which both m/z and intensity information of the possible fragmentation ions are taken into consideration for improved accuracy. We validated our method using a standard glycoprotein, human transferrin, and evaluated its potential to be used in site-specific glycosylation profiling of glycoprotein datasets from LC-MS/MS. In addition, we further applied our method to reveal, for the first time, the site-specific N-glycosylation profile of recombinant human acetylcholinesterase expressed in HEK293 cells. For maximum usability, SpectraST is developed as part of the Trans-Proteomic Pipeline (TPP), a freely available and open-source software suite for MS data analysis.

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