McLaughlin Nolan K, Rincon Pabon Juan P, Gies Samantha, Dastvan Reza, Gross Michael L
Department of Chemistry, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
Division of Molecular and Cellular Function, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Protein Sci. 2025 Apr;34(4):e70096. doi: 10.1002/pro.70096.
Hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) is now a critical tool in molecular biology and structural proteomics. It is routinely used to probe protein and conformational dynamics through a well-established experiment where amide hydrogens exchange with deuterium atoms in a buffer containing DO. Although there have been numerous advances in the field, data analysis still poses challenges mainly due to the need for manual curation of the data and the lack of standardized statistics and accessible software. In response, we developed Kingfisher, an open-source, user-friendly, web-based solution that facilitates downstream analysis using well-established statistics and provides advanced high-resolution representations of the HDX results. Kingfisher is able to read data directly as exported from common software packages and usually takes less than a minute to run the analysis, without the need to download the raw code or install any software. We foresee Kingfisher as a valuable tool for both newcomers and experts in the field of Hydrogen Exchange Mass Spectrometry. Kingfisher is available to all users as an interactive web application at https://kingfisher.wustl.edu/.
氢-氘交换质谱法(HDX-MS)如今是分子生物学和结构蛋白质组学中的一项关键工具。它通常通过一个成熟的实验来探测蛋白质和构象动力学,在该实验中,酰胺氢与含有重水(D₂O)的缓冲液中的氘原子进行交换。尽管该领域已取得众多进展,但数据分析仍面临挑战,主要原因在于需要人工整理数据,且缺乏标准化统计方法和易用软件。作为回应,我们开发了翠鸟(Kingfisher),这是一个基于网络的开源且用户友好的解决方案,它利用成熟的统计方法促进下游分析,并提供HDX结果的高级高分辨率表示。翠鸟能够直接读取从常用软件包导出的数据,运行分析通常耗时不到一分钟,无需下载原始代码或安装任何软件。我们预计翠鸟将成为氢交换质谱领域新手和专家的宝贵工具。所有用户均可通过交互式网络应用程序https://kingfisher.wustl.edu/使用翠鸟。