Analysis of Glutamine Deamidation: Products, Pathways, and Kinetics

Spontaneous chemical modifications play an important role in human disease and aging at the molecular level. Deamidation and isomerization are known to be among the most prevalent chemical modifications in long-lived human proteins and are implicated in a growing list of human pathologies, but the relatively minor chemical change associated with these processes has presented a long standing analytical challenge. Although the adoption of high-resolution mass spectrometry has greatly aided the identification of deamidation sites in proteomic studies, isomerization (and the isomeric products of deamidation) remain exceptionally challenging to characterize. Herein, we present a liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry-based approach for rapidly characterizing the isomeric products of Gln deamidation using diagnostic fragments that are abundantly produced and capable of unambiguously identifying both Glu and isoGlu. Importantly, the informative fragment ions are produced through orthogonal fragmentation pathways, thereby enabling the simultaneous detection of both isomeric forms while retaining compatibility with shotgun proteomics. Furthermore, the diagnostic fragments associated with isoGlu pinpoint the location of the modified residue. The utility of this technique is demonstrated by characterizing the isomeric products generated during in vitro aging of a series of glutamine-containing peptides. Sequence-dependent product profiles are obtained, and the abundance of deamidation-linked racemization is examined. Finally, comparisons are made between Gln deamidation, which is relatively poorly understood, and asparagine deamidation, which has been more thoroughly studied.