Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Mol Cell Proteomics. 2012 Dec;11(12):1758-67. doi: 10.1074/mcp.M112.019620. Epub 2012 Sep 10.
The primary structural information of proteins employed as biotherapeutics is essential if one wishes to understand their structure-function relationship, as well as in the rational design of new therapeutics and for quality control. Given both the large size (around 150 kDa) and the structural complexity of intact immunoglobulin G (IgG), which includes a variable number of disulfide bridges, its extensive fragmentation and subsequent sequence determination by means of tandem mass spectrometry (MS) are challenging. Here, we applied electron transfer dissociation (ETD), implemented on a hybrid Orbitrap Fourier transform mass spectrometer (FTMS), to analyze a commercial recombinant IgG in a liquid chromatography (LC)-tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) top-down experiment. The lack of sensitivity typically observed during the top-down MS of large proteins was addressed by averaging time-domain transients recorded in different LC-MS/MS experiments before performing Fourier transform signal processing. The results demonstrate that an improved signal-to-noise ratio, along with the higher resolution and mass accuracy provided by Orbitrap FTMS (relative to previous applications of top-down ETD-based proteomics on IgG), is essential for comprehensive analysis. Specifically, ETD on Orbitrap FTMS produced about 33% sequence coverage of an intact IgG, signifying an almost 2-fold increase in IgG sequence coverage relative to prior ETD-based analysis of intact monoclonal antibodies of a similar subclass. These results suggest the potential application of the developed methodology to other classes of large proteins and biomolecules.
如果希望了解蛋白质的结构-功能关系,以及进行新治疗药物的合理设计和质量控制,那么作为生物治疗药物的蛋白质的主要结构信息是必不可少的。由于完整免疫球蛋白 G(IgG)的尺寸较大(约 150 kDa)且结构复杂,包括数量不定的二硫键,因此其广泛的碎片化以及随后通过串联质谱(MS)进行的序列测定具有挑战性。在这里,我们在混合轨道阱傅里叶变换质谱仪(FTMS)上应用电子转移解离(ETD),对商业重组 IgG 进行液相色谱(LC)-串联质谱(MS/MS)自上而下的实验分析。通过在执行傅里叶变换信号处理之前,对不同的 LC-MS/MS 实验中记录的时域瞬变进行平均,解决了在大型蛋白质自上而下 MS 中通常观察到的灵敏度低的问题。结果表明,与之前在 IgG 上基于 ETD 的自上而下蛋白质组学应用相比,提高的信噪比以及轨道阱 FTMS 提供的更高分辨率和质量精度对于全面分析至关重要。具体而言,轨道阱 FTMS 上的 ETD 产生了完整 IgG 的约 33%序列覆盖度,与之前对类似子类完整单克隆抗体进行基于 ETD 的分析相比,IgG 序列覆盖度几乎增加了 2 倍。这些结果表明,所开发的方法学可能适用于其他类别的大型蛋白质和生物分子。