Peptidoglycan fragments separation and identification by zwitterionic hydrophilic interaction chromatography and capillary electrophoresis coupled to mass spectrometry

Bacterial peptidoglycan-derived peptides and muropeptides are soluble unique fragments acting as messengers in diverse cell-signalling events. As the bacterial peptidoglycan wall is a major target of antibiotics, bacteria have developed specific resistance mechanisms based on the detection of such fragments. In addition, the muropeptides sensing is involved in the innate immune response toward bacterial invasion and is therefore of major importance in the eukaryotes self-defence functions.
In Bacillus licheniformis 749/I, the peptidoglycan dipeptide m-A2pm-D-Glu triggers beta-lactam resistance via the induction of a beta-lactamase, BlaP. This induction process relies on a complex regulation system for which the nature and the concentration of peptidoglycan fragments leading to the formation of dipeptide moiety inside the cytoplasm are unknown. In this context, the development and the validation of a reliable method to identify and quantify those cytoplasmic fragments is of major interest.
Conventionally, the peptidoglycan is first digested by mutanolysin in order to generate muropeptides which are subsequently analyzed by reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RP-LC, C18). However, this technique is not effective enough to separate the peptides that, as a result, are eluted in the flow through . In this work, we developed two novel analytical separation methods, namely capillary electrophoresis (CE) and zwitterionic hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (ZIC-HILIC) both coupled to mass spectrometry (MS), aiming at overcoming the drawbacks encountered in traditional separation techniques. Both methods show great results in the identification of peptidoglycan fragments in complex samples. CE analysis lead to muropeptides and peptides separation whereas ZIC-HILIC only retains peptides. Nevertheless, the latter has been optimized and validated for the cytoplasmic peptidoglycan peptides identification and quantification.
Althogether, ZIC-HILIC-MS and CE-MS have proved to be powerful analytical tools for the identification and quantification of peptidoglycan fragments in complex matrix samples. Further optimizations are still ongoing for the analysis of muropeptides, which hopefully will lead to the identification and quantification of cytoplasmic peptidoglycan fragments composition during the Bacillus licheniformis 749/I BlaP beta-lactamase induction process.