Post-translational modifications (PTMs) of proteins play significant roles in regulation of biological activities and signal transduction. Examining their diversity is critical for understanding the mechanisms of cellular regulations. Among the various techniques employed for identification of PTMs, mass spectrometry has become a more and more important tool for detecting and mapping these covalent modifications and quantifying their changes. The two projects described in this dissertation focus mainly on the method development for characterization of two major PTMs, disulfide bonds and glycosylation. In the first project, the disulfide bond pattern of a rhamnose-binding lectin SEL24K from the Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha was assigned unambiguously based on a multi-enzyme digestion strategy in combination with MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry analysis. The disulfide bond pattern was found to be symmetrical in the tandem repeat sequence of SEL24K. More importantly, an interesting phenomenon of gas-phase scrambling of disulfide bonds was observed during MALDI mass spectrometry analysis and a possible mechanism for this surprising scrambling was proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of disulfide bond scrambling in the gas phase during MALDI-MS analysis. This observation has important ramifications for unambiguous assignment of disulfide bonds. In the second project, the glycosylation of a glycoprotein ZPA from the vitelline envelope of Xenopus laevis was determined by applying a strategy of general proteolysis coupled with mass spectrometry. The vitelline envelope glycoproteins were first separated through SDS-PAGE. A nonspecific in-gel pronase digestion was performed on the excised band of ZPA to produce informative small glycopeptides. Lectin affinity chromatography was used for the enrichment of these glycopeptides. An in-gel PNGase F digestion was also carried out to release the N-linked glycans from ZPA. The enriched glycopeptides and glycans were finally analyzed by MS and MS/MS techniques on MALDI-TOF and MALDI-TOF/TOF instruments.

The thesis describes utilizing mass spectrometry and computational methods to study two groups of molecular systems: small organic molecules and oligopeptides. The gas-phase acidities were measured and the structures of the molecular species were calculated. The small molecules investigated included methylparaben, ibuprofen, and triclosan, all known to have some biological activity. The gas-phase acidity measurements made for these small molecules had the solvent and collisional gas pressures adjusted in order to observe their potential influences. The results obtained provide insight into the ion chemistry of these molecules and how the energetics may change the observed behavior of the ion as well as the resulting thermochemical properties measured. The oligopeptides studied were a family of tri-peptides in which a cysteine probe was placed within an alanine backbone. The cysteine probe was either in the L- or D- configuration in order to detect any fundamental differences among the diastereotopic peptides. Compared to the L-cysteine isomers, the D-cysteine peptides appear to display a change in gas-phase behavior and their respective dissociation profiles. These changes may have an implication of altering the biochemical properties when chirality changes in biological systems.

Protein sequences contain the information in order for a protein to fold to a unique compact, three-dimensional native structure. The forces that drive protein structures to form compact folds are largely dominated by burial of hydrophobic amino acids, which results in non-specific packing of amino acid side-chains. The knob-socket model attempts to organize side-chain packing into tetrahedral packing motifs. This tetrahedral motif is characterized with a three residues on the same secondary structure forming the base of the tetrahedron packing with a side-chain from a separate secondary structure. The base of the motif is termed the socket, and the other side-chain is called the knob. Here, we focus on extending the knob-socket model to understand tertiary and quaternary structure. First, single knobs sometimes pack into more than one socket in real structures. We focus on understanding the topology and amino acid preferences of these tertiary packing surfaces. The main results from the study of tertiary packing surfaces is that they have a preferred handedness, some interactions are ancillary to the packing interaction, there are specific amino preferences for specific positions in packing surfaces, and there is no relationship between side-chain rotamer of the knob packing into the tertiary packing surface. Next, we examine the application of the knob-socket to irregular and mixed packing in protein structure. The main conclusions from these efforts show canonical packing modes between secondary structures and highlight the important of coil secondary structure in providing many of the knobs for packing. Third, we investigate protein quaternary structure with a clique analysis of side-chain interactions. We identify a possible pseudo knob-socket interaction, and compare knob-socket interactions between tertiary and quaternary structure. Lastly, we discuss the workflow used in CASP12 to predict side-chain contacts and atomic coordinates of proteins.

Proteins are molecular machines of life in the truest sense. Being the expressors of genotype, proteins have been a focus in structural biology. Since the first characterization and structure determination of protein molecule more than half a century ago1, our understanding of protein structure is improving only incrementally. While computational analysis and experimental techniques have helped scientist view the structural features of proteins, our concepts about protein folding remain at the level of simple hydrophobic interactions packing side-chain at the core of the protein. Furthermore, because the rate of genome sequencing is far more rapid than protein structure characterization, much more needs to be achieved in the field of structural biology. As a step in this direction, my dissertation research uses computational analysis and experimental techniques to elucidate the fine structural features of the tertiary packing in proteins. With these set of studies, the knowledge of the field of structural biology extends to the fine details of higher order protein structure.