Glycans and their conjugates form the largest and most diverse class of biological molecules found within nature. These glycosides are vital for numerous cellular functions including recognition events, protein stabilisation and energy storage, to name a few. Additionally, abnormalities within these structures are associated with a wide range of disease states. As a result, robust analytical techniques capable of in depth characterisation of carbohydrates and their binding partners are required. Currently, liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry (MS2) is the 'gold standard' for characterising these species. However there are inherent challenges for 'sequencing' carbohydrates given that most structures are diastereomeric. As a result MS alone is insufficient to fully elucidate all stereochemical and often regiochemical information and alternative analytical techniques have inherent issues meaning that they are not suitable for medium/high throughput analysis. To facilitate elucidation of these structures, ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) has been used in-line with MS2. IMS of mono- and di-saccharide product ions generate by collision-induced dissociation (CID) of various glycans and their conjugates enables unambiguous identification of the monomer and the regio-/stereo-chemistry of the glycosidic bond, independent of the precursor structure. Also, given the prominence of glycans in biological recognition events, high-throughput techniques capable of elucidating and characterising carbohydrate to glycan-binding protein (GBP) interactions are highly sought after. Historically, (micro)array strategies are employed to screen large numbers of biological interactions, with detection conventionally achieved with fluorescent tagging. The major disadvantage of this approach is the requirement of a labelling step to facilitate detection of glycan-GBP binding. MS offers the ability to unambiguously identify GBPs when combined with routine bottom-up proteomics strategies, namely on-chip proteolysis followed by mass fingerprinting and MS2 analysis and subsequent comparison to protein databases. It is anticipated that these methodologies developed throughout these studies, both for carbohydrate sequencing and the characterisation of glycan-binding proteins, will greatly add to the Glycomics toolbox.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:727854 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Gray, Christopher |
| Contributors | Flitsch, Sabine |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/comprehensive-stereochemical-sequencing-of-carbohydrates-and-characterisation-oftheir-binding-partners-using-hyphenated-mass-spectrometry-methods(0f606678-b7d1-4a5c-817a-fff2b9fab90a).html |
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