Identifying intact N-glycopeptides from tandem mass spectrometry data using StrucGP

Protein glycosylation is of great importance in many biological processes. Glycosylation has been increasingly analyzed at the intact glycopeptide level using mass spectrometry to study site-specific glycosylation changes under different physiological and pathological conditions. StrucGP is a glycan database-independent search engine for the structural interpretation of N-glycoproteins at the site-specific level. To ensure the accuracy of results, two collision energies are implemented in instrument settings for each precursor to separate fragments of peptides and glycans. In addition, the false discovery rates (FDR) of peptides and glycans as well as probabilities of detailed structures are estimated. In this protocol, the use of StrucGP is demonstrated, including environment configuration, data preprocessing as well as result inspection and visualization using our in-house software “GlycoVisualTool”. The described workflow should be able to be performed by anyone with basic proteomic knowledge.