An integrated mass spectrometry strategy for quantifying the proteoform diversity of the extensively modified O-glycoprotein Osteopontin

Abstract

O-glycosylation is among the most abundant and structurally diverse post-translational modifications in eukaryotes, yet its heterogeneity renders O-glycoproteins exceptionally difficult to characterize. To overcome these challenges, we have developed an integrated mass spectrometry (MS) strategy to define the proteoform landscape of O-glycoproteins and applied it to human osteopontin (OPN). OPN is a disease-associated extracellular matrix protein subject to extensive modification. By combining native MS with serial exoglycosidase digestions, we directly resolved truncation, phosphorylation, sulfation, and O-glycosylation of OPN. Matched glycoproteomic analyses, using tailored (glyco)protease combinations, allowed us to quantify glycan heterogeneity inaccessible to conventional trypsin-based approaches or protein-centric methods. We integrated these datasets using forward compositional simulations to infer the intact OPN proteoform distribution and benchmarked the resulting models against an experimental intact-mass distribution obtained by proton-transfer charge-reduction MS. This comparison revealed that bottom-up O-glycoproteomics systematically underestimates the true extent of glycan sialylation, whereas assuming (near-)complete sialylation accurately reproduced the experimental intact OPN mass distribution. Together, these results provide a comprehensive, quantitative view of OPN compositional diversity and demonstrate how intact-protein and peptide-level measurements can be reconciled to resolve highly heterogeneous glycoform populations. The workflow establishes a broadly applicable framework for characterizing extensively O-glycosylated and multiply modified proteins.