How to discriminate between leucine and isoleucine by low energy ESI-TRAP MSn

J Am Soc Mass Spectrom. 2007 Jan;18(1):57-63. doi: 10.1016/j.jasms.2006.08.011. Epub 2006 Sep 28.

Abstract

In peptide sequencing experiments involving a single step tandem mass acquisition, leucine and isoleucine are indistinguishable because both are characterized by a 113 Da mass difference from the other peptide fragments in the MS2 spectrum. In this work, we propose a new method to distinguish between these two amino acids in consecutive MSn experiments, exploiting a gas-phase fragmentation of isoleucine that leads to a diagnostic 69 Da ion. We used this method to assess the Leu/Ile residues of several synthetic peptides. The procedure was then tested on a tryptic digest of myoglobin, assigning the correct amino acid in the majority of the peptides. This work was performed with an old and low-resolution instrument, thus demonstrating that our method is suitable for a wide number of ion trap mass spectrometers, not necessarily expensive or up-to-date.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Amino Acid Sequence
  • Animals
  • Horses
  • Isoleucine / analysis*
  • Leucine / analysis*
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Myoglobin / chemistry
  • Peptides / analysis
  • Peptides / chemistry
  • Sequence Analysis, Protein
  • Spectrometry, Mass, Electrospray Ionization / methods*

Substances

  • Myoglobin
  • Peptides
  • Isoleucine
  • Leucine