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Abstract:
Glycosylation is a post-translational modification that enriches protein complexity and function. Dysregulation of glycosylation is associated with a wide range of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, as well as congenital, cardiovascular, immunological and infectious disorders. With regard to biotechnology, proper glycosylation of biologicals is important, as deviations in glycosylation are known to be associated with adverse drug reactions and reduced therapeutic efficacy. Therefore, glycomics is a rapidly emerging field that can be viewed as a complement to other „omics“ approaches including proteomics and genomics. There is a dramatic dynamic increase in the demand for sophisticated databases and analytical tools in glycobiology respectively glycobiotechnology. However, glycomics is significantly lagging behind genomics and proteomics, mainly due to the absence of high-throughput analytical methods which can reliably quantify a multitude of glycan structures in complex biological samples. For that reason, the EU-wide collaborative project “Methods for high-throughput (HTP) analysis of protein glycosylation” is funded within the FP7 of the European Union and will be started in 2011. The project is designed to fill that technology gap through development of relevant, reliable, and affordable commercial HTP glycoanalysis tools. This modular glycoprofiling system – to be developed and established within the project – is based on three orthogonal analysis platforms (UPLC, MS and CGE-LIF). Project and analysis platforms will be presented, focussing on the glycoanalysis approach, based on multiplexed capillary gel electrophoresis with laser induced fluorescence detection (CGE-LIF) utilizing a DNA-sequencer, which shows high potential for high-throughput (HTP) glycoprofiling of glycoconjugates.
