Protein glycosylation, the process of attaching carbohydrates to protein molecules, is one of the most common post-translational modifications (PTMs) in nature1,2. Across all domains of life, a range of complex machinery has evolved dedicated to the generation of glycoproteins that impact a myriad of cellular functions1,3,4,5. While protein glycosylation occurs on a range of amino acids6,7, N-linked and O-linked glycosylation events are two dominant forms observed in nature. N-linked glycosylation involves the attachment of glycans to a nitrogen atom of asparagine (Asn) residues, while in O-linked glycosylation, glycans are attached to an oxygen atom of serine (Ser), threonine (Thr), or tyrosine (Tyr) residues7. Despite the similarities in residues targeted by glycosylation systems, the differences within the glycans attached to proteins result in glycosylation being the most chemically diverse class of PTMs found in nature.
While eukaryotic glycosylation systems possess glycan diversity, these systems are typically restricted in the number of unique carbohydrates utilized. The resulting diversity stems from how these carbohydrates are arranged into glycans8,9,10,11,12. In contrast, bacterial and archaeal species possess virtually unlimited glycan diversity due to the sheer array of unique sugars generated within these systems2,10,13,14,15,16,17. These differences in the glycan diversity observed across domains of life represent a significant analytical challenge for the characterization and identification of glycosylation events. For eukaryotic glycosylation, the ability to anticipate glycan compositions has facilitated the growing interest in glycobiology; yet, the same is not true for bacterial glycosylation, which is still largely restricted to study by specialized laboratories. As the accessibility of mass spectrometry (MS) instrumentation has increased in the biosciences, MS-based approaches are now the primary method for glycoproteomic analysis.
MS has emerged as the quintessential tool for the characterization of glycosylation, with both top-down and bottom-up approaches now commonly used to characterize glycoproteins6. While top-down proteomics is used to assess global glycosylation patterns of specific proteins18,19, bottom-up approaches are used to enable the glycan-specific characterization of glycopeptides, even from complex mixtures6,20,21,22,23. For the analysis of glycopeptides, the generation of informative fragmentation information is essential for the characterization of glycosylation events24,25. A range of fragmentation approaches is now routinely accessible on instruments, including resonance ion trap-based collision-induced dissociation (IT-CID), beam-type collision-induced dissociation (CID), and electron transfer dissociation (ETD). Each approach possesses different strengths and weaknesses for glycopeptide analysis25,26, with significant progress over the last decade in applying these fragmentation approaches to analyze glycosylation6,20. However, for bacterial glycosylation analysis, the critical limitation has not been the ability to fragment glycopeptides but rather the inability to predict the potential glycan compositions within samples. Within these systems, the unknown nature of diverse bacterial glycans limits the identification of glycopeptides, even with glycosylation-focused searching tools now commonplace for the analysis of eukaryotic glycopeptides, such as O-Pair27, GlycopeptideGraphMS28, and GlycReSoft29. To overcome this issue, an alternative searching method is required, with the use of open searching tools emerging as a powerful approach for the study of bacterial glycosylation30.
Open searching, also known as blind or wildcard searching, allows the identification of peptides with unknown or unexpected PTMs21,30,31,32. Open searches utilize a variety of computational techniques, including curated modification searches, multistep database searches, or wide-mass tolerant searching33,34,35,36,37. Although open searching has great potential, its use has typically been hindered by the significant increase in analysis times and loss in sensitivity of the detection of unmodified peptides compared to restricted searches31,32. The decrease in the detection of unmodified peptide-spectral matches (PSMs) is a result of the increased false-positive PSM rates associated with these techniques, which requires increased stringent filtering to maintain the desired false discovery rates (FDRs)33,34,35,36,37. Recently, several tools have become available that significantly improve the accessibility of open searching, including Byonic31,38, Open-pFind39, ANN-SoLo40, and MSFragger21,41. These tools enable the robust identification of glycosylation events by significantly reducing analysis times and implementing approaches to handle heterogeneous glycan compositions.
This article presents a streamlined method for the identification of bacterial glycopeptides by open searching, using the Gram-negative nosocomial pathogen, Acinetobacter baumannii, as a model. A. baumannii possesses a conserved O-linked glycosylation system responsible for the modification of multiple protein substrates, known as the PglL protein glycosylation system42,43,44. While similar proteins are targeted for glycosylation between strains, the PglL glycosylation system is highly variable due to the biosynthesis of the glycan used for protein glycosylation being derived from the capsule locus (known as the K-locus)44,45,46. This results in diverse glycans (also known as a K-unit), derived from single or limited polymerized K-units, being added to protein substrates30,44,46. Within this work, the use of the open searching tool, MSfragger, within the software FragPipe, is used to identify glycans across A. baumannii strains. By combining open searching and manual curation, "glycan-focused searches" can be undertaken to further improve the identification of bacterial glycopeptides. Together, this multistep identification approach enables the identification of glycopeptides without extensive experience in the characterization of novel glycosylation events.