Liu, Chen Publish ‘Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Structure Elucidation of Peptide b2 Ions’

Dr. Hao Chen

Pengyuan Liu and Dr. Hao Chen published “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Structure Elucidation of Peptide _b2 Ions” in the Angewandte Chemie International Edition on Dec. 10.

The two researchers are with the Center for Intelligent Chemical Instrumentation, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the Edison Institute of Biotechnology at Ohio University.

Liu is a Ph.D. student at Ohio University. Chen is Associate Professor of Chemistry at Ohio University. Their co-author was Dr. R. Graham Cooks of Purdue University.

Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is powerful for chemical identification but it is still insufficient for explicit ion structure determination. A strategy is introduced to elucidate MS fragment ion structures using NMR spectroscopy for the first time. In our experiments, precursor ions are dissociated at atmospheric pressure and the resulting fragment ions are identified by mass spectrometry but collected outside the mass spectrometer, making the subsequent NMR measurements possible. This new strategy has been applied to determine the chemical structure of the characteristic _b2 fragment ion, a subject of longstanding debate in MS-based proteomics.

This work was supported by NSF (CHE-1149367 and 1307264) and by an ASMS research award (to H.C.).