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Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative illness affecting millions of people worldwide1. It is characterized by the formation of cytoplasmic inclusions known as Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites in the brain's substantia nigra pars compacta region. These cytoplasmic inclusions have been found to contain aggregates of the intrinsically disordered protein aSyn2. In PD and other synucleinopathies, aSyn transforms from a soluble disordered state into an insoluble, highly structured diseased state. In its native form, monomeric aSyn adopts a wide range of conformations stabilized by long-range electrostatic interactions between its N- and C-termini and hydrophobic interactions between its C-terminus and non-amyloid beta component (NAC) region3,4,5,6. Any disruptions in those stabilizing interactions, such as mutations, post-translational modifications, and changes in the local environment, can lead to the misfolding of the monomer, thus triggering the process of aggregation7.
While a vast amount of research exists on the oligomeric and fibrillar forms of aSyn8,9,10,11, there is a crucial need to study the monomeric form of the protein and better understand which conformers are functional (and how) and which are prone to aggregate8,9,10,11. Being intrinsically disordered, only 14 kDa in size, and difficult to crystallize, the aSyn monomer is not amenable to most structural biological techniques. However, one technique capable of measuring the conformational dynamics of monomeric aSyn is millisecond HDX-MS, which has recently generated important structural observations that would be challenging or impossible to obtain otherwise12,13,14. Millisecond HDX-MS sensitively measures the average of the protein conformational ensemble by monitoring the isotopic exchange at amide hydrogens, indicating solvent accessibility and hydrogen-bonding network participation of a particular protein region on the millisecond timescale. It is necessary to stress the millisecond aspect of the HDX-MS as, due to its natively unfolded, meta-stable nature, aSyn exhibits very fast hydrogen-exchange kinetics that manifest well below the lower limit of conventional HDX-MS systems. For example, most of the aSyn molecule has completely exchanged hydrogen for deuterium under intracellular conditions in less than 1 s. Several laboratories have now built fast-mixing instrumentation; in this case, a prototype fast-mixing quench-flow instrument capable of performing HDX-MS with a dead-time of 50 ms and a temporal resolution of 1 ms is used15. While millisecond HDX-MS has recently been acutely important in the study of aSyn, it stands to be valuable in studying intrinsically disordered proteins/regions more widely and a large number of proteins with loops/regions that are only weakly stable. For example, peptide drugs (e.g., insulin; GLP-1/glucagon; tirzepatide) and peptide-fusion proteins (e.g., the HIV inhibitor FN3-L35-T1144) are major drug formats where solution-phase structural and stability information can be a critical input for drug development decisions, and, yet, the peptide moiety is often only weakly stable and intractable by HDX-MS at the seconds timescale16,17,18,19,20. Emergent HDX-MS methods with labeling in the seconds/minutes domains have been shown to derive structural information for DNA G-quadruplexes, but it should be possible to extend this to more diverse oligonucleotide structures by the application of millisecond HDX-MS21.
HDX-MS experiments can be performed at three different levels: (1) bottom-up (whereby the labeled protein is digested proteolytically), (2) middle-down (whereby the labeled protein is digested proteolytically, and the resulting peptides are fragmented further by soft-fragmentation techniques), and (3) top-down (whereby soft-fragmentation techniques directly fragment the labeled protein)22. Thus, sub-molecular HDX-MS data allow us to localize the exchange behavior to specific regions of a protein, making it critical to have adequate sequence coverage for such experiments. The structural resolution of any HDX-MS experiment relies on the number of proteolytic peptides or fragments derived from the protein upon digestion or soft-fragmentation, respectively. In each of the three experiment types outlined above, the change in amide exchange at each peptide/fragment is mapped back onto the protein's primary structure to indicate the behavior of localized regions of the protein. While the highest structural resolution is achieved through soft-fragmentation, the description of these experiments is out of the scope of the current study, which focuses on the measurement of aSyn monomer conformations. Excellent results can be obtained with the commonly applied "bottom-up" workflow described here.
Here, procedures are provided on (1) how to prepare and handle aSyn samples and HDX-MS buffers, (2) how to perform peptide mapping for a bottom-up HDX-MS experiment, (3) how to acquire HDX-MS data on monomeric aSyn under physiological conditions, specifically in the millisecond time domain (using a custom-built instrument; alternative instruments for millisecond labeling have also been described), and (4) how to process and analyze the HDX-MS data. Methods using monomeric aSyn at physiological pH (7.40) in two solution conditions are exemplified here. While critically useful in the study of aSyn, these procedures can be applied to any protein and are not limited to intrinsically disordered proteins.