Mapping protein-ligand interactions in the gas phase using a functional group replacement strategy. Comparison of CID and BIRD activation methods

Protein-Small Molecule Interactions in Native Mass Spectrometry

Small molecule drug discovery has been propelled by the continual development of novel scientific methodologies to occasion therapeutic advances. Although established biophysical methods can be used to obtain information regarding the molecular mechanisms underlying drug action, these approaches are often inefficient, low throughput, and ineffective in the analysis of heterogeneous systems including dynamic oligomeric assemblies and proteins that have undergone extensive post-translational modification. Native mass spectrometry can be used to probe protein-small molecule interactions with unprecedented speed and sensitivity, providing unique insights into polydisperse biomolecular systems that are commonly encountered during the drug discovery process. In this review, we describe potential and proven applications of native MS in the study of interactions between small, drug-like molecules and proteins, including large multiprotein complexes and membrane proteins. Approaches to quantify the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of ligand binding are discussed, alongside a summary of gas-phase ion activation techniques that have been used to interrogate the structure of protein-small molecule complexes. We additionally highlight some of the key areas in modern drug design for which native mass spectrometry has elicited significant advances. Future developments and applications of native mass spectrometry in drug discovery workflows are identified, including potential pathways toward studying protein-small molecule interactions on a whole-proteome scale.

Quantitative characterization of galectin-3-C affinity mass spectrometry measurements: Comprehensive data analysis, obstacles, shortcuts and robustness

RATIONALE

Affinity mass spectrometry (AMS) is an emerging tool in the field of the study of protein•carbohydrate complexes. However, experimental obstacles and data analysis are preventing faster integration of AMS methods into the glycoscience field. Here we show how analysis of direct electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) AMS data can be simplified for screening purposes, even for complex AMS spectra.

METHODS

A direct ESI-MS assay was tested in this study and binding data for the galectin-3C•lactose complex were analyzed using a comprehensive and simplified data analysis approach. In the comprehensive data analysis approach, noise, all protein charge states, alkali ion adducts and signal overlap were taken into account. In a simplified approach, only the intensities of the fully protonated free protein and the protein•carbohydrate complex for the main protein charge state were taken into account.

RESULTS

In our study, for high intensity signals, noise was negligible, sodiated protein and sodiated complex signals cancelled each other out when calculating the K_d value, and signal overlap influenced the Kd value only to a minor extent. Influence of these parameters on low intensity signals was much higher. However, low intensity protein charge states should be avoided in quantitative AMS analyses due to poor ion statistics.

CONCLUSIONS

The results indicate that noise, alkali ion adducts, signal overlap, as well as low intensity protein charge states, can be neglected for preliminary experiments, as well as in screening assays. One comprehensive data analysis performed as a control should be sufficient to validate this hypothesis for other binding systems as well.

Sizing Up Protein-Ligand Complexes: The Rise of Structural Mass Spectrometry Approaches in the Pharmaceutical Sciences

Capturing the dynamic interplay between proteins and their myriad interaction partners is critically important for advancing our understanding of almost every biochemical process and human disease. The importance of this general area has spawned many measurement methods capable of assaying such protein complexes, and the mass spectrometry-based structural biology methods described in this review form an important part of that analytical arsenal. Here, we survey the basic principles of such measurements, cover recent applications of the technology that have focused on protein-small-molecule complexes, and discuss the bright future awaiting this group of technologies.

Resonance activation and collision-induced-dissociation of ions using rectangular wave dipolar potentials in a digital ion trap mass spectrometer

Collision-induced dissociation (CID) of ions by resonance activation in a quadrupole ion trap is usually accomplished by resonance exciting the ions to higher kinetic energy, whereby the high kinetic energy ions collide with a bath gas, such as helium or argon, inside the trap and dissociate to fragments. A new ion activation method using a well-defined rectangular wave dipolar potential formed by dividing down the trapping rectangular waveform is developed and examined herein. The mass-selected parent ions are resonance excited to high kinetic energies by simply changing the frequency of the rectangular wave dipolar potential and dissociation proceeds. A relationship between the ion mass and the activation waveform frequency is also identified and described. This highly efficient (CID) procedure can be realized by simply changing the waveform frequency of the dipolar potential, which could certainly simplify tandem mass spectrometry analysis methods.

Robotically assisted titration coupled to ion mobility-mass spectrometry reveals the interface structures and analysis parameters critical for multiprotein topology mapping

Multiprotein complexes have three-dimensional shapes and dynamic functions that impact almost every aspect of biochemistry. Despite this, our ability to rapidly assess the structures of such macromolecules lags significantly behind high-throughput efforts to identify their function, especially in the context of human disease. Here, we describe results obtained by coupling ion mobility-mass spectrometry with automated robotic sampling of different solvent compositions. This combination of technologies has allowed us to explore an extensive set of solution conditions for a group of eight protein homotetramers, representing a broad sample of protein structure and stability space. We find that altering solution ionic strength in concert with dimethylsulfoxide content is sufficient to disrupt the protein-protein interfaces of all of the complexes studied here. Ion mobility measurements captured for both intact assemblies and subcomplexes match expected values from available X-ray structures in all cases save two. For these exceptions, we find that distorted subcomplexes result from extreme disruption conditions, and are accompanied by small shifts in intact tetramers size, thus enabling the removal of distorted subcomplex data in downstream models. Furthermore, we find strong correlations between the relative intensities of disrupted protein tetramers and the relative number and type of interactions present at interfaces as a function of disrupting agent added. In most cases, this correlation appears strong enough to quantify various types of protein interfacial interactions within unknown proteins following appropriate calibration.