High-Resolution Hydrogen-Deuterium Protection Factors from Sparse Mass Spectrometry Data Validated by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Measurements

Experimental measurement of time-dependent spontaneous exchange of amide protons with deuterium of the solvent provides information on the structure and dynamical structural variation in proteins. Two experimental techniques are used to probe the exchange: NMR, which relies on different magnetic properties of hydrogen and deuterium, and MS, which exploits the change in mass due to deuteration. NMR provides residue-specific information, that is, the rate of exchange or, analogously, the protection factor (i.e., the unitless ratio between the rate of exchange for a completely unstructured state and the observed rate). MS provides information that is specific to peptides obtained by proteolytic digestion. The spatial resolution of HDX-MS measurements depends on the proteolytic pattern of the protein, the fragmentation method used, and the overlap between peptides. Different computational approaches have been proposed to extract residue-specific information from peptide-level HDX-MS measurements. Here, we demonstrate the advantages of a method recently proposed that exploits self-consistency and classifies the possible sets of protection factors into a finite number of alternative solutions compatible with experimental data. The degeneracy of the solutions can be reduced (or completely removed) by exploiting the additional information encoded in the shape of the isotopic envelopes. We show how sparse and noisy MS data can provide high-resolution protection factors that correlate with NMR measurements probing the same protein under the same conditions.