ETD in a traveling wave ion guide at tuned Z-spray ion source conditions allows for site-specific hydrogen/deuterium exchange measurements

Kasper Dyrberg Rand, Steven D. Pringle, Michael Morris, John R. Engen, Jeffery M. Brown

    61 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    The recent application of electron transfer dissociation (ETD) to measure the hydrogen exchange of proteins in solution at single-residue resolution (HX-ETD) paves the way for mass spectrometry-based analyses of biomolecular structure at an unprecedented level of detail. The approach requires that activation of polypeptide ions prior to ETD is minimal so as to prevent undesirable gas-phase randomization of the deuterium label from solution (i.e., hydrogen scrambling). Here we explore the use of ETD in a traveling wave ion guide of a quadrupole-timeof-flight (Q-TOF) mass spectrometer with a "Z-spray" type ion source, to measure the deuterium content of individual residues in peptides. We systematically identify key parameters of the Z-spray ion source that contribute to collisional activation and define conditions that allow ETD experiments to be performed in the traveling wave ion guide without gas-phase hydrogen scrambling. We show that ETD and supplemental collisional activation in a subsequent traveling wave ion guide allows for improved extraction of residue-specific deuterium contents in peptides with low charge. Our results demonstrate the feasibility, and illustrate the advantages of performing HX-ETD experiments on a high-resolution Q-TOF instrument equipped with traveling wave ion guides. Determination of parameters of the Z-spray ion source that contribute to ion heating are similarly pertinent to a growing number of MS applications that also rely on an energetically gentle transfer of ions into the gas-phase, such as the analysis of biomolecular structure by native mass spectrometry in combination with gas-phase ion-ion/ion-neutral reactions or ion mobility spectrometry.

    Original languageEnglish
    JournalJournal of The American Society for Mass Spectrometry
    Volume22
    Issue number10
    Pages (from-to)1784-1793
    ISSN1044-0305
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Oct 2011

    Keywords

    • Former Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences

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