提高N-连接完整糖肽鉴定准确性的母离子特征筛选策略

Improving Confidence for the Identification of N-Linked Intact Glycopeptides Based on the Precursor Feature

  • 摘要: 将糖链设置为糖基化位点上的可变修饰是鉴定完整糖肽的常见策略。可变修饰策略的检索性能依赖设置的糖库,糖库越大,产生的随机匹配越多,则完整糖肽鉴定的准确性越差。随机匹配的完整糖肽会造成母离子质荷比的分配发生同位素偏移,进而影响糖链部分的鉴定。由于可变修饰检索只考虑肽段的碎裂,而忽略糖修饰碎裂产生的糖碎片离子,因此,该方法仅依赖二级质谱图信息无法系统地对母离子和完整糖肽的匹配进行评估与考察。基于一级质谱图的母离子特征(如流出曲线、强度分布等信息)可实现对鉴定结果的筛选,排除母离子同位素偏移导致的错误鉴定,提高完整糖肽结果的准确性。本方法通过母离子特征筛选,在同位素标记的酵母标准数据集中将鉴定假阳性率从11.31%降至4.15%。小鼠组织样品的数据处理结果表明,该方法可用于提升复杂体系中完整糖肽鉴定的准确性。

     

    Abstract: As a common and heterogeneous post-translational modification (PTM), glycosylation takes part in a wide variety of biological processes. Precision analysis of glycosylation is of great value for the determination of their functional roles and the discovery of novel disease biomarkers. Mass spectrometry-based identification of intact glycopeptide has become increasingly popular in glycosylation studies due to its ability for high-throughput analysis of glyco-sites and glycan modifications simultaneously. Variable modification searching strategy by setting database glycans as variable modification on glycosites is commonly used in the identification of intact glycopeptides. Due to the issues of search space and random match, the performance of variable modification strategy is affected by the size of glycan database adopted in analysis. Inappropriate using of glycan databases in intact glycopeptide identification often results in poor analysis coverage or high false positive rate. In addition, the misassignment of precursor, which causes incorrect derivation of mass value of glycopeptides, is also frequently observed in the identification process and leads to incorrect glycopeptide spectrum interpretation. As only peptide fragment ions in glycopeptide spectra are matched by setting the glycan part as variable modifications, the confidence of precursor assignment and glycopeptide identification can not be fully assessed by spectrum matching scores, which are often solely based on peptide fragment ions. The spectrum features of glycopeptide precursor, including elution profiles and intensity distributions of isotopic peak list, can be utilized to screen the incorrect glycopeptide results caused by isotopic shift, which are great helpful to elevate the reliability of identification results. In this work, the effect of glycan databases on the performance of variable modification searching was firstly investigated by using the dataset of yeast as a benchmark, since only oligo-mannose N-glycans were synthesized in yeast. Applying the method of precursor feature screening, the false discovery rate of glycopeptide identification was reduced from 11.31% to 4.15% on the dataset of yeast. Further analysis for the glycan part of glycopeptide results proved that precursor feature screening was able to remove false positive identifications at high specificity. In addition, investigation on the dataset of mouse tissues also indicated that the precursor feature screening method could be utilized to improve the identification confidence for the analysis of complex samples. Being different from fragment ion matching, precursor feature screening method provides an alternative approach to assess the confidence of glycopeptide identification by utilizing the information of precursor isotopic peaks, which is of potential helpful for glycosylation studies.

     

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