Methods for the comprehensive structural elucidation of constitution and stereochemistry of lipopeptides

• Panel of methods for elucidation of constitution and stereochemistry of lipopeptides.
• Chiralpak ZWIX for amino acid and 3-hydroxyalkanoic acid LC–MS enantiomer separation.
• GC–MS method with Chirasil Val for confirmation of amino acid configurations.
• Determination of d-Leu position in peptide chain after enzymatic and chemical digestions.
• Zwitterionic chiral ion-exchanger showed complementary selectivities to RPLC and HILIC.

A panel of methods of general suitability for complete structural elucidation of the stereochemistry of cyclopeptides, depsipeptides and lipopeptides is presented and described in detail. The suitability of the proposed methods was exemplified on the lipopeptide poaeamide from Pseudomonas poae. Amino acid configurations have been assigned by direct LC enantiomer separation with Chiralpak ZWIX(+) and were confirmed by GC enantiomer separation on Chirasil L-Val. 3-Hydroxydecanoic acid absolute configuration was analyzed on Chiralpak ZWIX(+) and confirmed by injection on ZWIX(−) which showed opposite elution order. Plenty of d-amino acids have been found in this lipopeptide. It contained in total 5 Leu residues of which one had d-configuration. The position of the d-Leu in the peptide sequence was determined by pepsin and chemical digestions in combination with isolation of diagnostic peptide-fragments and subsequent identification of absolute configurations of the Leu residues. This allowed pinpointing the position of the d-amino acid. The complementarity of the peptide retention profiles on Chiralpak ZWIX column as compared to both RPLC and HILIC suggests its great utility as an alternative peptide separation tool.