Large scale glycopeptide identification with stepped HCD and Mascot!

If you say to me "hey weirdo! can you find some glycopeptides in this thing?"

I'll probably respond "didn't I ask you to stop calling me that? and this is a refrigerator. I can find some glycopeptides with a mass spectrometer, but there are none of those in this room."

Glycopeptides are going to be the one time that I'm definitely going to break out ETD. Probably HCD  first and triggering the ETD fragmentation if oxonium ions show up in the low mass range.

This team didn't have ETD. They had a Q Exactive, and this doesn't slow them down for a second! 

They develop a method using stepped collision energy on the Q Exactive and analyze glycopeptide fragmentation in a single high resolution spectra. Then they just process the results in Mascot. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I should have access to a Mascot server this week (for the first time in seven years) and I think we've got some glycopeptides to work on. I say it's time to give it a go!