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. 2021 Apr 7;32(4):936-945.
doi: 10.1021/jasms.0c00450. Epub 2021 Mar 8.

Global Profiling of Lysine Accessibility to Evaluate Protein Structure Changes in Alzheimer's Disease

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Global Profiling of Lysine Accessibility to Evaluate Protein Structure Changes in Alzheimer's Disease

Kaiwen Yu et al. J Am Soc Mass Spectrom. .

Abstract

The linear sequence of amino acids in a protein folds into a 3D structure to execute protein activity and function, but it is still challenging to profile the 3D structure at the proteome scale. Here, we present a method of native protein tandem mass tag (TMT) profiling of Lys accessibility and its application to investigate structural alterations in human brain specimens of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this method, proteins are extracted under a native condition, labeled by TMT reagents, followed by trypsin digestion and peptide analysis using two-dimensional liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry (LC/LC-MS/MS). The method quantifies Lys labeling efficiency to evaluate its accessibility on the protein surface, which may be affected by protein conformations, protein modifications, and/or other molecular interactions. We systematically optimized the amount of TMT reagents, reaction time, and temperature and then analyzed protein samples under multiple conditions, including different labeling time (5 and 30 min), heat treatment, AD and normal human cases. The experiment profiled 15370 TMT-labeled peptides in 4475 proteins. As expected, the heat treatment led to extensive changes in protein conformations, with 17% of the detected proteome displaying differential labeling. Compared to the normal controls, AD brain showed different Lys accessibility of tau and RNA splicing complexes, which are the hallmarks of AD pathology, as well as proteins involved in transcription, mitochondrial, and synaptic functions. To eliminate the possibility that the observed differential Lys labeling was caused by protein level change, the whole proteome was quantified with standard TMT-LC/LC-MS/MS for normalization. Thus, this native protein TMT method enables the proteome-wide measurement of Lys accessibility, representing a straightforward strategy to explore protein structure in any biological system.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; and tau; proteomics; structural mass spectrometry; structuromics; tandem mass tag.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Experimental design and method optimization. (a) Workflow of native protein TMT labeling. Proteins are extracted from different samples, and directly labeled with TMT reagents under a native condition. The same protein may have different structures in the two samples, highlighted with color, in which a Lys residue with different surface exposure are differentially labeled. The TMT-labeled proteins are further pooled, fully denatured and proteolyzed into peptides for LC/LC-MS/MS analysis. Differentially labeled TMT peptides are quantified by MS2 spectra, indicating the difference in Lys accessibility. (b) Titration of TMT reagents. The percentage of identified TMT-labeled peptides in all identified peptides is shown with different TMT:tissue (w/w) ratios. The reaction time was fixed at 30 min. (c) Time course analysis. The percentage of identified TMT-labeled peptides is shown with different time points. The TMT:tissue ratio was fixed at 1:1.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Evaluation of native protein TMT labeling by analyzing samples under various conditions. (a) Proteome-wide Lys accessibility profiling of two controls and two AD human brain tissues by native protein TMT labeling, with or without heating, using different labeling time. One technical replicate was also added in the batch. (b) Comparison of proteome coverage with different MS protocols. The proteome coverage of the native protein TMT experiment was aligned with that of a deep brain label-free proteome dataset (10,544 proteins). (c) Miscleavage distribution. TMT modification causes trypsin miscleavage at Lys residue. (d) Peptide length distribution. The miscleavage increased the length of tryptic peptides in the native protein TMT analysis. (e) Peptide charge distribution. The miscleavage shifts the peptide charge distribution toward high charge states in the native protein TMT experiment.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Impact of labeling time and heat on proteome structure by the native protein TMT experiment. (a-b) DE peptides and proteins between the 5 min and 30 min labeled samples. (c) Relative abundance of R-flanking peptides in highly abundant protein species at 5 min and 30 min of labeling. (d-e) DE peptides and proteins between the heated and no heat samples. (f) Percentage of heat-induced DE peptides and proteins in all quantified peptides and proteins.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
TMT peptide ratio normalization by protein level between AD and control samples. (a) Whole proteome profiling of the same samples (two AD cases and two controls) was performed to normalize the TMT peptide ratio. (b) Effect of normalization. The number of DE peptides before and after normalization. 53 peptides (45% in 119 DE peptides) were discarded and 37 peptides (36% in 103 DE peptides) were added during normalization. (c) Example proteins and their corresponding peptides showing the discarded (ANLN) and added (NEFM) DE peptides during normalization.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Structural alterations of tau and other pathway proteins in AD brain. (a) DE peptides between AD and normal control samples. (b) Functional categories of DE proteins and their corresponding DE peptides. The classification of DE proteins was manually performed according to protein function. (c) PPI network of RNA splicing proteins in the DE protein list. PPI analysis of DE proteins was carried out with the STRING database.

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