Assigning Peptide Disulfide Linkage Pattern Among Regio-Isomers via Methoxy Addition to Disulfide and Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

Pinpointing disulfide linkage pattern is critical in the characterization of proteins and peptides consisting of multiple disulfide bonds. Herein, we report a method based on coupling online disulfide modification and tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) to distinguish peptide disulfide regio-isomers. Such a method relies on a new disulfide bond cleavage reaction in solution, involving methanol as a reactant and 254 nm ultraviolet (UV) irradiation. This reaction leads to selective cleavage of a disulfide bond and formation of sulfenic methyl ester (–SOCH 3 ) at one cysteine residue and a thiol (–SH) at the other. Under low energy collision-induced dissociation (CID), cysteine sulfenic methyl ester motif produces a signature methanol loss (–32 Da), allowing its identification from other possible isomeric structures such as S-hydroxylmethyl (–SCH 2 OH) and methyl sulfoxide (–S(O)-CH 3 ). Since disulfide bond can be selectively cleaved and modified upon methoxy addition, subsequent MS 2 CID of the methoxy addition product provides enhanced sequence coverage as demonstrated by the analysis of bovine insulin. More importantly, this reaction does not induce disulfide scrambling, likely due to the fact that radical intermediates are not involved in the process. An approach based on methoxy addition followed by MS 3 CID has been developed for assigning disulfide linkage patterns in peptide disulfide regio-isomers. This methodology was successfully applied to characterizing peptide systems having two disulfide bonds and three disulfide linkage isomers: side-by-side, overlapped, and looped-within-a-loop configurations. [Figure not available: see fulltext.].