Sodium dodecyl sulfate capillary electrophoresis (CE-SDS) has been widely used to separate and quantify monoclonal antibody (mAb) fragments and impurities. Two fragments with different masses smaller than monomer were observed in the CE-SDS analysis of a recombinant IgG1 mAb treated at 40 °C for 28 days. Reversed phase liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (RP–LC–MS) and trypsin digestion peptide mapping followed by LC–MS/MS analysis were employed to conclusively demonstrate that these antibody fragments were the degradation products derived from a Ser–Ser peptide bond cleavage at the heavy chain complementarity determining region (CDR). The total percentage of the cleaved antibody heavy chain was increased from 1.1% in the control sample to 4.6% in the forced degradation sample stored at 40 °C for 28 days by using CE-SDS analysis. Native size exclusion liquid chromatography (SEC-HPLC) was used to analyze the fragment profile of this treated mAb but did not reveal fragments smaller than the monomer. However, a small fragment was detected using denaturing size exclusion liquid chromatography (dSEC-HPLC) and was confirmed to be the N-terminal fragment of the heavy chain cleaved at the CDR region using RP–LC–MS analysis. These results suggested that this N-terminal fragment may be closely associated with the rest of the cleaved antibody molecule through non-covalent bond interactions. Moreover, when dSEC-HPLC and RP–LC–MS were used to analyze the aggregate and monomer samples individually collected from SEC-HPLC, both samples contained the same amount of the cleaved N-terminal fragment. These results suggested that the CDR region cleaved fragments likely not be involved in aggregates formation of this antibody. This case study reiterated that a combination of orthogonal analytical methods plays a crucial role in comprehensively analyzing and characterizing antibody fragmentation.
Purposes The main purposes of this article are to describe an unprecedented phenomenon in which significant amount of a shoulder peak impurity was observed during normal non-reducing capillary electrophoresis-sodium dodecyl sulfate (CE-SDS) analysis of a recombinant fusion protein X, and to evaluate the root cause for this phenomenon. Methods A series of experiments were conducted to study the nature of this degradation. Effects of iodoacetamide (IAM), heating temperature, duration, and SDS on the formation of this specific impurity were evaluated using a variety of characterization techniques. Results The formation of the impurity as observed in CE-SDS was actually due to alkylation of lysine and serine residues with IAM, as confirmed by peptide mapping and LC-MS/MS, which increased the molecular weight and therefore decreased the electrophoretic mobility. The amount of impurity was also strongly dependent on sample preparation conditions including the presence or absence of SDS. Conclusions Our study clearly suggested that even though IAM has been used extensively as an alkylation reagent in the traditional non-reducing CE-SDS analysis of monoclonal antibodies and other proteins, alkylation with IAM could potentially lead to additional impurity peak, and therefore complicating analysis. Therefore, before performing CE-SDS and other analyses, the effects of sample preparation procedures on analytical results must be evaluated. For protein X, IAM should be excluded for CE-SDS analysis.
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