Top-down ion mobility/mass spectrometry reveals enzyme specificity:
Separation and sequencing of isomeric proteoforms
Abstract
Enzymatic catalysis is one of the fundamental processes that drives the
dynamic landscape of post-translational modifications (PTMs), expanding
the structural and functional diversity of proteins. Here, we assessed
enzyme specificity using a top-down ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) and
tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) workflow. We successfully applied
trapped IMS (TIMS) to investigate site-specific N-ε-acetylation of
lysine residues of full-length histone H4 catalyzed by histone lysine
acetyltransferase KAT8. We demonstrate that KAT8 exhibits a preference
for N-ε-actylation of residue K16, while also installing N-ε-acetyl
groups on residues K5 and K8 as the first degree of acetylation.
Achieving TIMS resolving power values of up to 300, we fully separated
mono-acetylated regioisomers (H4K5ac, H4K8ac, and H4K16ac). Each of
these regioisomers produce unique MS/MS fragment ions, enabling
estimation of their individual mobility distributions and the exact
localization of the N-ε-acetylation sites. This study highlights the
potential of top-down TIMS-MS/MS for conducting enzymatic assays at the
intact protein level and, more generally, for separation and
identification of isomeric proteoforms and precise PTM localization.