Oral Presentation 26th Annual Lorne Proteomics Symposium 2021

The post translational modification landscape of commercial beers using quantitative proteomics (#23)

Edward D Kerr 1 , Cassandra L Pegg 1 , Chris H Caboche 1 , Toan K Phung 1 , Mark T Howes 2 , Kate Howell 3 , Ben L Schulz 1
  1. University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
  2. Newstead Brewing Company, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
  3. School of Agriculture and Food, Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Beer is one of the most popular beverages, with ~1.95 billion hectolitres produced annually around the globe. As a product from complex agricultural ingredients and processes, the final beer is highly molecularly complex. We used SWATH-MS to investigate the proteomic complexity and diversity of a wide range of commercial Australian beers. While the overall complexity of the proteome was modest, with contributions from barley and yeast proteins, we uncovered a very high diversity of post-translational modifications, especially proteolysis, glycation, and glycosylation. We used newly developed data analysis pipelines to efficiently extract and quantify site-specific PTMs from SWATH-MS data, and showed incorporating these features extended analytical precision. We found that the key differentiator of the beer glyco/proteome was the brewery, followed by the beer style. Targeting our analyses on beers from a single brewery, Newstead Brewing Ltd, allowed us to identify beer style-specific features of the glyco/proteome, and show that abundant surface-active proteins from barley and yeast correlate with foam formation and stability.