PNNL

Abstract

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS), and particularly differential IMS or field asymmetric waveform IMS (FAIMS), was recently shown capable of separating post-translationally modified peptides with variant PTM localization. However, that work was limited to a model peptide with serine phosphorylation on fairly distant alternative sites. Here, we demonstrate that FAIMS (coupled to ESI/MS) can broadly baseline-resolve variant phosphopeptides from a biologically modified human protein, including those involving phosphorylation of different residues and adjacent sites that existing MS/MS methods are most challenged to distinguish. Singly and doubly phosphorylated variants can be resolved equally well and identified without dissociation, based on accurate separation properties. The results are unchanged over a range of infusion solvent pH, hence present approach should work in conjunction with chromatographic separations using a mobile phase gradient.