Ion mobility-resolved phosphoproteomics with dia-PASEF and short gradients

Abstract

Mass spectrometry-based phosphoproteomics has identified >150,000 post-translational phosphorylation sites in the human proteome. To disentangle their functional relevance, complex experimental designs that require increased throughput are now coming into focus. Here, we apply dia-PASEF on a trapped ion mobility (TIMS) mass spectrometer to analyze the phosphoproteome of a human cancer cell line in short liquid chromatography gradients. At low sample amounts equivalent to [~]20 ug protein digest per analysis, we quantified over 12,000 phosphopeptides including [~]8,000 class I phosphosites in one hour without a spectral library. Decreasing the gradient time to 15 min yielded virtually identical coverage of the phosphoproteome, and with 7 min gradients we still quantified about 80% of the class I sites with a median coefficient of variation <10% in quadruplicates. We attribute this in part to the increased peak capacity, which effectively compensates for the higher peptide density per time unit in shorter gradients. Our data shows a five-fold reduction in the number of co-isolated peptides with TIMS. In the most extreme case, these were positional isomers of nearby phosphosites that remained unresolved with fast chromatography. In summary, we demonstrate how key features of dia-PASEF translate to phosphoproteomics, resulting in high throughput and sensitivity.