Browsing by Author "Pevzner, Pavel A."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Identification of ultramodified proteins using top-down tandem mass spectra
    (American Chemical Society, 2013-12-06) Liu, Xiaowen; Hengel, Shawna; Wu, Si; Tolić, Nikola; Pasa-Tolić, Ljiljana; Pevzner, Pavel A.; Department of BioHealth Informatics, IU School of Informatics and Computing
    Post-translational modifications (PTMs) play an important role in various biological processes through changing protein structure and function. Some ultramodified proteins (like histones) have multiple PTMs forming PTM patterns that define the functionality of a protein. While bottom-up mass spectrometry (MS) has been successful in identifying individual PTMs within short peptides, it is unable to identify PTM patterns spreading along entire proteins in a coordinated fashion. In contrast, top-down MS analyzes intact proteins and reveals PTM patterns along the entire proteins. However, while recent advances in instrumentation have made top-down MS accessible to many laboratories, most computational tools for top-down MS focus on proteins with few PTMs and are unable to identify complex PTM patterns. We propose a new algorithm, MS-Align-E, that identifies both expected and unexpected PTMs in ultramodified proteins. We demonstrate that MS-Align-E identifies many proteoforms of histone H4 and benchmark it against the currently accepted software tools.
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    SpectroGene: A Tool for Proteogenomic Annotations Using Top-Down Spectra
    (ACS Publications, 2016-01-04) Kolmogorov, Mikhail; Liu, Xiaowen; Pevzner, Pavel A.; BioHealth Informatics, School of Informatics and Computing
    In the past decade, proteogenomics has emerged as a valuable technique that contributes to the state-of-the-art in genome annotation; however, previous proteogenomic studies were limited to bottom-up mass spectrometry and did not take advantage of top-down approaches. We show that top-down proteogenomics allows one to address the problems that remained beyond the reach of traditional bottom-up proteogenomics. In particular, we show that top-down proteogenomics leads to the discovery of previously unannotated genes even in extensively studied bacterial genomes and present SpectroGene, a software tool for genome annotation using top-down tandem mass spectra. We further show that top-down proteogenomics searches (against the six-frame translation of a genome) identify nearly all proteoforms found in traditional top-down proteomics searches (against the annotated proteome). SpectroGene is freely available at http://github.com/fenderglass/SpectroGene .
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    Top-down analysis of immunoglobulin G isotypes 1 and 2 with electron transfer dissociation on a high-field Orbitrap mass spectrometer
    (Elsevier, 2017-04) Fornelli, Luca; Ayoub, Daniel; Aizikov, Konstantin; Liu, Xiaowen; Damoc, Eugen; Pevzner, Pavel A.; Makarov, Alexander; Beck, Alain; Tsybin, Yury O.; Department of Biohealth Informatics, School of Informatics and Computing
    The increasing importance of immunoglobulins G (IgGs) as biotherapeutics calls for improved structural characterization methods designed for these large (~ 150 kDa) macromolecules. Analysis workflows have to be rapid, robust, and require minimal sample preparation. In a previous work we showed the potential of Orbitrap Fourier transform mass spectrometry (FTMS) combined with electron transfer dissociation (ETD) for the top-down investigation of an intact IgG1, resulting in ~ 30% sequence coverage. Here, we describe a top-down analysis of two IgGs1 (adalimumab and trastuzumab) and one IgG2 (panitumumab) performed with ETD on a mass spectrometer equipped with a high-field Orbitrap mass analyzer. For the IgGs1, sequence coverage comparable to the previous results was achieved in a two-fold reduced number of summed transients, which corresponds, taken together with the significantly increased spectra acquisition rate, to ~ six-fold improvement in analysis time. Furthermore, we studied the influence of ion-ion interaction times on ETD product ions for IgGs1, and the differences in fragmentation behavior between IgGs1 and IgG2, which present structural differences. Overall, these results reinforce the hypothesis that gas phase dissociation using both energy threshold-based and radical-driven ion activations is directed to specific regions of the polypeptide chains mostly by the location of disulfide bonds.
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    Top-down analysis of protein samples by de novo sequencing techniques
    (Oxford, 2016-09) Vyatkina, Kira; Wu, Si; Dekker, Lennard J. M.; VanDuijn, Martijn M.; Liu, Xiaowen; Tolić, Nikola; Luider, Theo M.; Paša-Tolić, Ljiljana; Pevzner, Pavel A.; Department of Biohealth Informatics, School of Informatics and Computing
    Motivation: Recent technological advances have made high-resolution mass spectrometers affordable to many laboratories, thus boosting rapid development of top-down mass spectrometry, and implying a need in efficient methods for analyzing this kind of data. Results: We describe a method for analysis of protein samples from top-down tandem mass spectrometry data, which capitalizes on de novo sequencing of fragments of the proteins present in the sample. Our algorithm takes as input a set of de novo amino acid strings derived from the given mass spectra using the recently proposed Twister approach, and combines them into aggregated strings endowed with offsets. The former typically constitute accurate sequence fragments of sufficiently well-represented proteins from the sample being analyzed, while the latter indicate their location in the protein sequence, and also bear information on post-translational modifications and fragmentation patterns. Availability and Implementation: Freely available on the web at http://bioinf.spbau.ru/en/twister.