Enhanced Identifications and Quantification through Retention Time Down-Sampling in Fast-Cycling diagonal-PASEF Methods

Abstract Data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry is essential for comprehensive quantification of proteomes, enabling deeper insights into cellular processes and disease mechanisms. On the timsTOF platform, diagonal-PASEF acquisition methods have recently been introduced to directly and continuously cover the observed diagonal shape of the peptide precursor ion distributions. Although diagonal-PASEF has shown great promise, its broad adoption as a routine workflow has been hampered by a lack of available algorithmic solutions and a paucity of demonstrated real-world applications. Here, we conducted a systematic and comprehensive optimization of diagonal-PASEF for 17-minute gradients on the timsTOF HT in conjunction to Spectronaut 19. We demonstrate that Spectronaut 19 fully supports all tested diagonal-PASEF methods independent of the number of slices or overlaps and with minimal user intervention required. Using our optimized analysis strategy we coupled diagonal-PASEF acquisitions to retention time down-sampling by summation (RTsum), thereby providing a novel mode of analysis of this data that exploits the fast-cycling nature of diagonal-PASEF methods. Through the combination of RTsum with diagonal-PASEF, we demonstrate that this strategy yields higher signal-to-noise ratios while retaining the peak shape for analytes of interest. Importantly, combining RTsum with diagonal-PASEF improved overall identifications and quantitative precision when compared to dia-PASEF with static or variable quadrupole isolation widths and across different input amounts for cell line injections. We also tested the performance of diagonal-PASEF in controlled quantitative experiments where diagonal-PASEF outperformed dia-PASEF in the overall number of retained candidates, quantitative precision and identifications on peptide level. These data indicate that RTsum demonstrates a positive use case of the high sampling rate of diagonal-PASEF. Collectively, our findings imply that diagonal-PASEF methods are superior for peptide and protein level analyses especially at lower input amounts.