Practice question

Amino acid residue mass equals monoisotopic molecular mass minus water lost during peptide bond formation. Valine molecular mass is 117.07 Da; subtracting 18.0106 Da for H2O yields 99.06 Da residue mass. Lysine residue is 128 Da, glycine 57 Da, serine 87 Da. This 99 Da value creates diagnostic mass difference between consecutive b or y ions in tandem mass spectra when valine is present in sequence. Knowledge of residue masses enables manual de novo sequencing, validation of proteomic database search results, and understanding of mass spectrometry fragmentation ladders in peptide identification.