Development of a Computational Tool for Automated Interpretation of Intact O-Glycopeptide Tandem Mass Spectra from Single Proteins

Anal Chem. 2020 May 5;92(9):6777-6784. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.0c01091. Epub 2020 Apr 21.

Abstract

Precise and automated analysis of site-specific O-glycosylation on single proteins is crucial for comprehensive characterization of some important glycoproteins, such as tumor biomarkers and recombinant drug proteins. Mass spectrometry has been proven to be a powerful technique for protein sequencing and N-glycosylation analysis. However, challenges remain in developing computational tools for intact O-glycopeptide analysis, which has greatly hindered the development of mass-spectrometry-based O-glycosylation analysis. Herein, an integrated strategy together with a dedicated automated computational tool termed AOGP was developed for intact O-glycopeptide analysis on single proteins. AOGP utilized de novo sequencing for O-glycans and a database search strategy for peptide backbones. The false discovery rate (FDR) of the identification results was controlled and validated by a mixed Gaussian distribution estimation method. AOGP exhibited superior performance in identifying intact O-glycopeptides of the human erythropoietin with a total of 188 O-glycopeptide spectra reported under 1% FDR. AOGP is developed in Python, is fully open-sourced, and is equipped with a user-friendly interface. Such an easy-operating and robust tool would greatly facilitate O-glycosylation analysis on single proteins in tumor biomarker and recombinant drug protein development.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Animals
  • Asialoglycoproteins / analysis*
  • Automation*
  • Cattle
  • Erythropoietin / analysis*
  • Fetuins / analysis*
  • Glycopeptides / analysis*
  • Glycosylation
  • Humans
  • Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Substances

  • Asialoglycoproteins
  • Fetuins
  • Glycopeptides
  • asialofetuin
  • Erythropoietin