The Use of Dansyl Chloride to Probe Protein Structure and Dynamics

Dansyl labeling is a widely used approach for enhancing the detection of small molecules by UV spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. It has been successfully applied to identify and quantify a variety of biological and environmental specimens. Despite clear advantages, the dansylation reaction has found very few applications in the study of proteins. We reasoned that the mild labeling conditions, small size, and rapid reaction could be beneficial for studying protein structure and dynamics. To test this, we investigated the impact of dansylation on protein fold, stability, protein-protein, and protein-cofactor interactions. We selected two model proteins, myoglobin and alcohol dehydrogenase, for analysis using native mass spectrometry and ion mobility mass spectrometry. Our work establishes the utility of dansyl chloride as a covalent probe to study protein structure and dynamics under native conditions.