The BioAccord System introduces the ACQUITY RDa Detector. The ACQUITY RDa is a high performance SmartMS system engineered with a smaller laboratory foot print and intelligent system setup, calibration, and optimization (Figure 1A) for easy deployment in a variety of lab settings. As part of this instrument design, the BioAccord System contains many user-friendly features to increase accessibility and instrument uptime including automated instrument mass calibration and system readiness check. When the instrument requires calibration, it will notify the operator and can be easily initiated with the “one-click” calibration feature (Figure 1B). The integrated informatics system constantly monitors and logs the instrument health status for maintained performance.
The integrated UNIFI informatics platform of the BioAccord System is comprised of an analytical workflow for peptide analysis. This peptide mapping workflow is a fully automated informatics solution dedicated for robust protein sequence confirmation (Figure 2A and B), PTM identification, and relative quantitation of protein modifications. Figure 3A shows a processed chromatogram with peptide peaks labeled for tryptic peptides of mAb tryptic digestion standard (p/n 186009126). The raw spectrum of the largest tryptic peptide (T15, MW = 6713.3144 Da) from the heavy chain shows well resolved monoisotopic peak (Figure 3B). In one of its modes of operation, the ACQUITY RDa is capable of generating structurally informative fragment ions, adding more confidence to peptide assignments (Figure 3C). This unique feature is achieved by alternating MS scans (one with low energy voltage, and one with high energy voltage ramping) during data acquisition. As a result, the instrument can be operated in MS only or full scan with fragmentation (data independent acquisition) modes with collision induced fragmentation. The overall peptide mapping workflow allows scientists to confirm sequence coverage, achieve peptide level PTM characterization and determine the extent of quality attributes of the protein drug in single or batch processed samples (Figure 4).
