<p><a>Site-specific characterization of glycosylation requires
intact glycopeptide analysis, and recent efforts have focused on how to best interrogate
glycopeptides using tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS). Beam-type collisional
activation, i.e., higher-energy collisional dissociation (HCD), has been a
valuable approach, but stepped collision energy HCD (sceHCD) and electron
transfer dissociation with HCD supplemental activation (EThcD) have emerged as
potentially more suitable alternatives. Both sceHCD and EThcD have been used
with success in large-scale glycoproteomic experiments, but they each incur
some degree of compromise. Most progress has occurred in the area
N-glycoproteomics. There is growing interest in extending this progress to
O-glycoproteomics, which necessitates comparisons of method performance for the
two classes of glycopeptides. Here, we systematically explore the advantages and
disadvantages of conventional HCD, sceHCD, ETD, and EThcD for intact
glycopeptide analysis and determine their suitability for both N- and
O-glycoproteomic applications. For N-glycopeptides, HCD and sceHCD generate
similar numbers of identifications, although sceHCD generally provides higher
quality spectra. Both significantly outperform EThcD methods, indicating that
ETD-based methods are not required for routine N-glycoproteomics. Conversely,
ETD-based methods, especially EThcD, are indispensable for site-specific
analyses of O-glycopeptides. Our data show that O-glycopeptides cannot be
robustly characterized with HCD-centric methods that are sufficient for
N-glycopeptides, and glycoproteomic methods aiming to characterize
O-glycopeptides must be constructed accordingly.</a></p>