title: An unusual family of glycosylated peptides isolated from Dendroaspis angusticeps venom and characterized by combination of collision induced and electron transfer dissociation.
abstract: This study describes the structural characterization of a totally new family of peptides from the venom of the snake green mamba (Dendroaspis angusticeps). Interestingly, these peptides differ in several points from other already known mamba toxins. First of all, they exhibit very small molecular masses, ranging from 1.3 to 2.4 kDa. The molecular mass of classical mamba toxins is in the range of 7 to 25 kDa. Second, the new peptides do not contain disulfide bonds, a post-translational modification commonly encountered in animal toxins. The third difference is the very high proportion of proline residues in the sequence accounting for about one-third of the sequence. Finally, these new peptides reveal a carbohydrate moiety, indicating a glycosylation in the sequence. The last two features have made the structural characterization of the new peptides by mass spectrometry a real analytical challenge. Peptides were characterized by a combined use of MALDI- TOF/TOF and nanoESI-IT-ETD experiments to determine not only the peptide sequence but also the composition and the position of the carbohydrate moiety. Anyway, such small glycosylated and proline-rich toxins are totally different from any other known snake peptide and form, as a consequence, a new family of peptides.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de spectrométrie de masse, Département de Chimie-GIGA-R, Université de Liège, Liège 4000, Belgium. loic.quinton@ulg.ac.be
authors.forename: Loïc
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Quinton
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Gilles
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Smargiasso
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kiehne
authors.forename: Edwin
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: De Pauw
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D002852:Chromatography, Ion Exchange; D004546:Elapid Venoms / Q000737:chemistry*; D017815:Elapidae; D006031:Glycosylation; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010455:Peptides / Q000737:chemistry*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein / Q000379:methods*; D021241:Spectrometry, Mass, Electrospray Ionization; D019032:Spectrometry, Mass, Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption-Ionization / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D004546:Elapid Venoms; D010455:Peptides