O-Glycopeptide Truncation Strategy for Heterogeneous O-GalNAc Glycoproteomics Characterization

Anal Chem. 2023 Jul 4;95(26):10017-10024. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.3c01327. Epub 2023 Jun 21.

Abstract

Mucin-type O-glycosylation (or O-GalNAcylation) takes place on most membrane and secretory proteins and is vital in regulating protein functions and many biological processes. O-GalNAcylation generally exhibits highly diverse and dense O-glycans linked to carrier proteins, which challenges the analysis of O-GalNAc glycoproteome using conventional methodologies. Here, we report an O-glycopeptide truncation strategy for the characterization of protein O-GalNAcylation in biological samples. The O-glycopeptide truncation strategy utilizes proteases or O-glycopeptidases for targeted cleavage of the enriched tryptic O-glycopeptides. It simplifies the O-glycopeptide backbones, O-glycans, or both, and has been shown to aid the improvement of the analytical coverage of O-GalNAc glycopeptides and glycoproteins. Tryptic O-glycopeptides covered with O-glycan clusters and terminal sialic acids could be well isolated by the hydrophilic-based enrichment approaches. The enriched O-glycopeptides are then enzymatically truncated into shorter or less multiply O-glycosylated peptides, which are more favorable for mass spectrometry detection and database search in general bottom-up glycoproteomics. We also investigate different proteolysis which could be well integrated into the O-glycopeptide truncation strategy. For large-scale analysis, we exploit different truncation schemes and identify nearly 2000 O-glycopeptides corresponding to 391 glycoproteins from 75 μL human serum, achieving the deepest-scale coverage of O-glycoproteins compared to other plasma/serum O-glycoproteomic studies. Together, the O-glycopeptide truncation strategy has great potential to facilitate the in-depth study of O-GalNAc glycoproteomics in biological samples.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Glycopeptides* / analysis
  • Glycoproteins / chemistry
  • Glycosylation
  • Humans
  • Polysaccharides / analysis
  • Proteomics* / methods

Substances

  • Glycopeptides
  • Glycoproteins
  • Polysaccharides