Immuno-Affinity Mass Spectrometry: A Novel Approaches with Biomedical Relevance

Identifying antigen-antibody interactions have been shown as a critical step in understanding the proteins biological functions and their involvement in various pathological conditions. While many techniques have been developed to characterize antigen-antibody interactions, one strategy that has gained considerable momentum over the last decade for the identification and quantification of antigen-antibody interactions, is immune affinity-chromatography followed by mass spectrometry. Moreover, the combination of enzymatic digestion of antigens and mass spectrometric identification of specific binding peptide(s) to the corresponding anti-antigen antibody has become a versatile and clinical relevant method for mapping epitopes by mass spectrometry. In this chapter, the development and applications of novel immunoaffinity mass spectrometric methodologies for elucidating biomedical aspects will be presented. First, a simplified mass spectrometric approach that maps an epitope from a digested antigen solution without immobilizing the anti-antigen antibody on a solid support will be reported. iMALDI (from immunoaffinity and MALDI, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization), a technique that involves immunoaffinity capture of specific peptides and direct MALDI measurements was used for absolute quantification of serine/threonine-specific protein kinase (AKT) peptides from breast cancer and colon cancer cell lines and flash-frozen tumor lysates. The intact transition epitope mapping (ITEM) was shown as a rapid and accurate epitope mapping method by using Ion mobility mass spectrometry (IMS-MS) for analysing the antigen peptide-containing immune complex previously generated by in solution epitope extraction/excision procedures.