Determination of Cysteine Connectivity in Bioactive Peptides

Abstract

Conotoxins are diverse and well-studied, and is therefore suited as a model to develop a general method for analyzing disulfide-rich peptides. To investigate the folding of both commercially available and self-synthesized Conotoxins, an UHPLC-MS/MS method was developed where one disulfide-bridge was reduced at the time and alkylated with different maleimides. The results from the UHPLC-MS/MS method were examined in a peptide- and protein-structure determination software.