Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, Mayo Clinic, 200 First ST SW, Rochester, MN 55905, USA.
Proteomics Core, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN 55905, USA.
Analyst. 2023 Jul 26;148(15):3466-3475. doi: 10.1039/d3an00080j.
Although single cell RNA-seq has had a tremendous impact on biological research, a corresponding technology for unbiased mass spectrometric analysis of single cells has only recently become available. Significant technological breakthroughs including miniaturized sample handling have enabled proteome profiling of single cells. Furthermore, trapped ion mobility spectrometry (TIMS) in combination with parallel accumulation-serial fragmentation operated in data-dependent acquisition mode (DDA-PASEF) allowed improved proteome coverage from low-input samples. It has been demonstrated that modulating the ion flux in TIMS affects the overall performance of proteome profiling. However, the effect of TIMS settings on the analysis of low-input samples has been less investigated. Thus, we sought to optimize the conditions of TIMS with regard to ion accumulation/ramp times and ion mobility range for low-input samples. We observed that an ion accumulation time of 180 ms and monitoring a narrower ion mobility range from 0.7 to 1.3 V s cm resulted in a substantial gain in the depth of proteome coverage and in detecting proteins with low abundance. We used these optimized conditions for proteome profiling of sorted human primary T cells, which yielded an average of 365, 804, 1116, and 1651 proteins from single, five, ten, and forty T cells, respectively. Notably, we demonstrated that the depth of proteome coverage from a low number of cells was sufficient to delineate several essential metabolic pathways and the T cell receptor signaling pathway. Finally, we showed the feasibility of detecting post-translational modifications including phosphorylation and acetylation from single cells. We believe that such an approach could be applied to label-free analysis of single cells obtained from clinically relevant samples.
虽然单细胞 RNA 测序技术对生物研究产生了巨大的影响,但相应的用于无偏质谱分析单细胞的技术直到最近才出现。包括小型化样品处理在内的重大技术突破使单细胞的蛋白质组分析成为可能。此外,结合平行堆积-串行碎裂的俘获离子淌度谱(TIMS)在数据依赖采集模式(DDA-PASEF)下运行,允许从低输入样本中提高蛋白质组覆盖率。已经证明,调节 TIMS 中的离子通量会影响蛋白质组分析的整体性能。然而,TIMS 设置对低输入样品分析的影响尚未得到充分研究。因此,我们试图优化 TIMS 的条件,使其在离子积累/斜坡时间和低输入样品的离子淌度范围方面达到最佳。我们观察到,离子积累时间为 180ms,监测的离子淌度范围较窄,为 0.7 至 1.3V s cm,可显著提高蛋白质组覆盖率和检测低丰度蛋白质的深度。我们使用这些优化的条件对分选的人原代 T 细胞进行蛋白质组分析,分别从单个、五个、十个和四十个 T 细胞中获得了 365、804、1116 和 1651 个蛋白质。值得注意的是,我们证明了从少量细胞中获得的蛋白质组覆盖率足以描绘几个重要的代谢途径和 T 细胞受体信号通路。最后,我们证明了从单细胞中检测翻译后修饰(包括磷酸化和乙酰化)的可行性。我们相信,这种方法可以应用于从临床相关样本中获得的无标记单细胞分析。