Effect of Phosphorylation on the Collision Cross Sections of Peptide Ions in Ion Mobility Spectrometry

The insertion of ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) between LC and MS can improve peptide identification in both proteomics and phosphoproteomics by providing structural information that is complementary to LC and MS, because IMS separates ions on the basis of differences in their shapes and charge states. However, it is necessary to know how phosphate groups affect the peptide collision cross sections (CCS) in order to accurately predict phosphopeptide CCS values and to maximize the usefulness of IMS. In this work, we systematically characterized the CCS values of 4,433 pairs of mono-phosphopeptide and corresponding unphosphorylated peptide ions using trapped ion mobility spectrometry (TIMS). Nearly one-third of the mono-phosphopeptide ions evaluated here showed smaller CCS values than their unphosphorylated counterparts, even though phosphorylation results in a mass increase of 80 Da. Significant changes of CCS upon phosphorylation occurred mainly in structurally extended peptides with large numbers of basic groups, possibly reflecting intramolecular interactions between phosphate and basic groups.