Enrichment of N-Linked Glycopeptides and Their Identification by Complementary Fragmentation Techniques

Abstract

N-linked glycans are a ubiquitous posttranslational modification and are essential for correct protein folding in the endoplasmic reticulum of plants. However, this likely represents a narrow functional role for the diverse array of glycan structures currently associated with N-glycoproteins in plants. The identification of N-linked glycosylation sites and their structural characterization by mass spectrometry remains challenging due to their size, relative abundance, structural heterogeneity, and polarity. Current proteomic workflows are not optimized for the enrichment, identification and characterization of N-glycopeptides. Here we describe a detailed analytical procedure employing hydrophilic interaction chromatography enrichment, high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry employing complementary fragmentation techniques (higher-energy collisional dissociation and electron-transfer dissociation) and a data analytics workflow to produce an unbiased high confidence N-glycopeptide profile from plant samples.