Continuous Elution Proteoform Identification of Myelin Basic Protein by Superficially Porous Reversed-Phase Liquid...

Myelin basic protein (MBP) plays an important structural and functional role in the neuronal myelin sheath. Translated MBP exhibits extreme microheterogeneity with numerous alternative splice variants (ASVs) and post-translational modifications (PTMs) reportedly tied to central nervous system maturation, myelin stability, and the pathobiology of various de- and dys-myelinating disorders. Conventional bioanalytical tools cannot efficiently examine ASV and PTM events simultaneously, which limits understanding of the role of MBP microheterogeneity in human physiology and disease. To address this need, we report on a top-down proteomics pipeline that combines superficially porous reversed-phase liquid chromatography (SPLC), Fourier transform mass spectrometry (FTMS), data-independent acquisition (DIA) with nozzle-skimmer dissociation (NSD), and aligned data processing resources to rapidly characterize abundant MBP proteoforms within murine tissue. The three-tier proteoform identification and characterization workflow resolved four known MBP ASVs and hundreds of differentially modified states from a single 90 min SPLC-FTMS run on ∼0.5 μg of material. This included 323 proteoforms for the 14.1 kDa ASV alone. We also identified two novel ASVs from an alternative transcriptional start site (ATSS) of the MBP gene as well as a never before characterized S-acylation event linking palmitic acid, oleic acid, and stearic acid at C78 of the 17.125 kDa ASV.