Data Acquisition by Alternating Spectra Energy
UPLC/MSE is a unique, patented technology that has an extremely high duty cycle, allowing the acquisition of high quality accurate mass data in a simple, unbiased manner.
UPLC/MSE acquires data with two rapidly alternating MS functions. The first contains exclusively low-energy mass spectra, the second is composed of mass spectra acquired at elevated collision energy (designated as MSE). The resulting data set contains a comprehensive time-resolved record of all detectible precursor and product ions.
Precursor and product ions are associated by both retention time alignment and peak shape, enabling even chimeric peptides and overlapping ion clusters to be successfully handled. The resulting time-aligned precursor and product ion mass lists are used for peptide identification with the IdentityE System’s peptide ion informatics.
Peptide Ion Informatics
This bioinformatics software visualizes peptides and proteins with a new multi-layered physicochemical model of protein primary structure. Peptide ion accounting informatics adapts to each new UPLC/MSE data set using a pre-assessment survey. 250 identified peptides, per run, are used to fine-tune many of the 14 models used for both peptide and protein authentication.
After pre-assessment, an iterative database search strategy is initiated, identifying the most abundant protein within a sample by matching peptides, modified peptides, and retention times. An estimate of the absolute concentration of each protein is made by reference to an internal (protein) standard, allowing the fractions of all theoretical tryptic peptides that are plausibly detectable to be predicted. Proteins identified with fewer than the predicted number of peptides are sequence mapped for evidence of C/N-terminal processing.
When the most abundant protein is conclusively identified, all assigned peptide ions are subtracted from the working image of the data.