Escherichia coli 3-Deoxy-D-manno-octulosonate 8-phosphate（KDO8P） synthase catalyzed the condensation reaction between D-arabinose 5-phosphate（A5P） and phosphoenolpyruvate（PEP） to form KDO8P and inorganic phosphate（Pi）. The noncovalent tetrameric association ofKDO8P synthase was observed and dissociated in gas phase by means of electrospray ionization mass spectrometry under the very ＂soft＂ conditions. The results indicate that PEP-bound enzyme generated abundant tetrameric species as well as monomeric species at the ＂soft＂ conditions, whereas, the unbound enzyme favored the formation of a dimeric species. The mass spectra of the mixture of the enzyme with one of substrates, PEP, and A5P or one of products, KDO8P and Pi show that the complex of the unbound enzyme with PEP or Pi was prone to the formation of a monomeric species, whereas, that of the unbound enzyme with A5P or KDO8P was similar to the unbound enzyme. The intensity of the dimeric species increased with the increase of temperature at a collision voltage of 10 V. Taken together, the results presented here suggest that mass spectrometry will be a powerful tool to explore subtile conformational changes and/or subunit-subunit interactions of multiprotein assembly induced by ligand-binding and/or the changes of environmental conditions.
The catalytic and signaling activities of insulin receptor kinase （IRK） are regulated by the autophosphorylation of three tyrosine residues in a cytoplasmic protein-tyrosine kinase domain at Tyro 1158, Tyro 1162 and Tyro 1163. In this study, time-course of the auphosphorylation of the core kinase （residues 978-1283） from IRK was directly investigated by online electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. It is found that two tyrosine residues were phosphorylated in reaction time range of 30 min. This study implies that mass spectrometric technique must be a powerful tool to directly monitor the biological macromolecular modification and will also provide the information of the order and the mechanism of autophosphorylation at the tyrosine sites coupled with tandem mass spectrometric technique.
