To cleave or not to cleave: a systemic evaluation of DSS versus DSSO for cross-linking mass spectrometry analysis

Cross-linking mass spectrometry is a powerful method for structural analysis, but choosing between cleavable and non-cleavable cross-linkers remains challenging. We rigorously compared non-cleavable DSS with cleavable DSSO and found that DSS consistently yields more cross-link identifications from isolated protein complexes to bacterial lysates. The advantage of DSS diminishes as sample complexity increases. At the highest complexity tested-human cell lysate-the trend reverses, with DSSO outperforming DSS. The superior performance of DSS in less complex samples is likely explained by its longer and more flexible spacer arm, which interrogates a spatial volume >40% larger than that of DSSO. For both cross-linkers, the number of identified cross-links decreases as the search space expands, but more steeply for DSS. This sharper decline arises from DSS cross-links producing slightly lower fragment ion coverage, not from the absence of signature ions that could reduce search space. Fragment ion coverage is key to interactome mapping: when coverage reaches 85% or above, identification sensitivity hardly decreases as the search space expands, regardless of the cross-linker used. In summary, we recommend DSS for samples no more complex than bacterial lysates. For interactome mapping of mammalian cells, although DSSO outperforms DSS, neither achieves deep interactome coverage.