Leveraging native mass spectrometry and 193 nm ultraviolet photodissociation as structural biology tools

Structural biology studies aimed at the elucidation of protein-dependent disease mechanisms have traditionally relied on high-resolution techniques, including X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance, and cryogenic electron microscopy. While such methodologies remain standard for gaining information on the core structure of proteins, specific drawbacks including time or large sample quantities associated with these approaches have spawned the development of other pipelines. Mass spectrometry (MS) is one such tool that has gained traction as a rapid and sensitive low-resolution structural biology technique. Routinely protein complexes of interest are reacted in solution with covalent chemical probes to preserve structural information prior to enzymatic digestion and mass spectrometric read-out. However, with the advent of native MS, protein complexes can now be efficiently transferred intact into the gas phase using high ionic strength solutions while retaining structures reminiscent of their solution conformations, and directly interrogated using MS/MS methods. Ultraviolet photodissociation (UVPD) is one such ion activation method that has been extensively developed to break apart protein complexes in a manner that allows conclusions about structure to be drawn based on the fragmentation behavior. The work presented here leverages native mass spectrometry in conjunction with 193 nm UVPD to probe a variety of biologically important protein-ligand and protein-protein complexes. The utility in a native UVPD-MS approach for structural examination of protein-ligand complexes is demonstrated through characterization of conformational changes associated with the catalytic cycle of a phosphotransferase enzyme as well as elucidation of structural changes resulting from mutation or inhibition of an enzyme responsible for conferring antibiotic resistance to bacteria. An oncogenic protein and several clinical variants bound to a downstream effector protein provides an example of the capabilities of native MS and UVPD to characterize the structure of a protein-protein complex. Native UVPD-MS is also used for epitope mapping of the main antigenic determinant of the influenza virus. Aimed at improving analysis of larger complexes, multistage native UVPD-MS is developed to probe the structure of a protein implicated in chemotherapeutic resistance in glioblastoma tumors. Lastly, uniting on-line capillary electrophoresis (CE) with multistage native UVPD-MS offers a high-throughput workflow for structural characterization of ribosomal protein complexes.Chemistr