Impact of Protease on Ultraviolet Photodissociation Mass Spectrometry for Bottom-up Proteomics

Recent mass spectrometric studies have reported enhanced proteome coverage by employing multiple proteases or by using multiple or alternative activation methods such as electron-transfer dissociation in combination with collisional-activated dissociation (CAD). In this study the use of 193 nm ultraviolet photodissociation for the analysis of thousands of Halobacterium salinarum peptides generated by four proteases (trypsin, LysC, GluC, and chymotrypsin) was evaluated in comparison with higher energy CAD (HCD). Proteins digested by trypsin resulted in greater sequence coverage for HCD over UVPD. LysC digestion resulted in similar sequence coverages for UVPD and HCD; however, for proteins digested by GluC and chymotrypsin 5-10% more sequence coverage on average was achieved by UVPD. HCD resulted in more peptide identifications (at 1% false discovery rate) for trypsin (4356 peptides by HCD versus 3907 peptides by UVPD), whereas UVPD identified greater numbers of peptides for LysC digests (1033 peptides by UVPD versus 844 HCD), chymotrypsin digests (3219 peptides for UVPD versus 2921 for HCD), and GluC digests (2834 peptides for UVPD and 2393 for HCD) and correspondingly greater numbers of proteins.