Proteoform Thursday: Melissa Bärenfänger presents “Pushing Ion Mobility MS to Understand Glycoproteins: From Increasing Glycoproteomics IDs to Observing Glycoprotein Unfolding”

Apr 27, 2023 11:00 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Ion mobility mass spectrometry has become a popular tool for proteomics applications, delivering high peptide identification rates. However, the characterization of post-translational modifications, such as N-glycosylation, remains a challenge. To address this, we developed a holistic glycoproteomics method that favors glycopeptide identification and applied this method to characterize the glycoproteome of cerebrospinal fluid in patients diagnosed with congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG). After describing severe differences in the glycoproteome, we use ion mobility MS to understand the impact of these differences on glycoprotein stability using collision-induced unfolding (CIU) experiments, with the aim of revealing a structure-function relationship between proteoforms and their different functions in vivo.