PNNL

Abstract

Chemical cross-linking combined with mass spectrometric analysis is emerging as a powerful technique for protein-protein interaction and protein structure elucidation studies.1 Cross-linkers covalently link two interacting proteins, often with chemistries specific to certain amino acid side chains. After enzymatic digestion of the proteins, the resulting cross-linked peptides can be subjected to analysis by LC-MS(/MS) to identify cross-linked species.2,3 For studying protein interactions using chemical cross-linking towards global discovery-based applications, the critical needs are the development of cross-linkers that are highly specific, amenable to LC-MS/MS, and resulting spectra are interpretable by bioinformatics tools to automatically assign cross-linked peptides with high confidence.4-10 As recently mentioned by Aebersold and co-workers, due to the low relative abundances of cross-linking products compared to their unmodified counterparts, enrichment of cross-linked species is also highly desirable to improve the likelihood of unambiguous identification of cross-linked peptides.6 Most of the currently available enrichable cross-linkers are bulky and are not amenable to studying protein-protein interactions in vivo. To discover protein-protein interactions with high confidence, there is a need for chemical cross-linkers that can effectively label protein complexes, utilize mass spectrometry based bottom-up proteomics analysis pipelines and also contains enrichment functionality.