There is a growing demand to develop high-throughput
and high-sensitivity
mass spectrometry methods for single-cell proteomics. The commonly
used isobaric labeling-based multiplexed single-cell proteomics approach
suffers from distorted protein quantification due to co-isolated interfering
ions during MS/MS fragmentation, also known as ratio compression.
We reasoned that the use of MS3-based quantification could mitigate
ratio compression and provide better quantification. However, previous
studies indicated reduced proteome coverages in the MS3 method, likely
due to long duty cycle time and ion losses during multilevel ion selection
and fragmentation. Herein, we described an improved MS acquisition
method for MS3-based single-cell proteomics by employing a linear
ion trap to measure reporter ions. We demonstrated that linear ion
trap can increase the proteome coverages for single-cell-level peptides
with even higher gain obtained via the MS3 method. The optimized real-time
search MS3 method was further applied to study the immune activation
of single macrophages. Among a total of 126 single cells studied,
over 1200 and 1000 proteins were quantifiable when at least 50 and
75% nonmissing data were required, respectively. Our evaluation also
revealed several limitations of the low-resolution ion trap detector
for multiplexed single-cell proteomics and suggested experimental
solutions to minimize their impacts on single-cell analysis.