氟固相萃取辅助的生物分子质谱分析新方法

氟固相萃取(Fluorous solid-phase extraction,FSPE)是一种基于全氟化合物之间氟-氟相互作用的固相萃取技术,通过在目标分子上进行氟标签衍生,利用高氟化固相吸附剂实现特异性的分离纯化.这一技术在有机合成、催化,以及化学和生物分离分析等诸多领域应用广泛.近年来,由于氟固相萃取和生物质谱技术之间良好的兼容性,两者联用结合的分析方法受到了研究者的广泛关注.本文在简要介绍氟固相萃取技术原理的基础之上,重点综述了其在生物质谱分析领域中的应用,并对其发展前景进行了展望.     

An Endorsement to Create Open Access Databases for Analytical Data of Complex Carbohydrates

Abstract

One of the aims of the emerging glycomics projects is to create a cell‐by‐cell catalogue of detected glycan structures. Mass spectrometry (MS) and NMR in combination with separation techniques are the most intensively applied experimental methods for the analysis of carbohydrates. Unlike genome and proteome databases, development of carbohydrate databases has gained a broader attention only recently. However, no spectral libraries of suitable pure and homogeneous standards have been compiled so far. The difficulties to describe complex carbohydrate structures are discussed and an overview of currently available data collections and applications is given. The current situation in glycobiology is characterized by a nearly complete loss of all primary analytical data. The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities to collect and distribute scientific data. Four suitable approaches how to organize the updating process for analytical data collections in the field of glycosciences are discussed. It is anticipated that open access data collections provide a better dissemination of scientific data, quicken scientific findings, guarantee better quality of data and initiate a number of new initiatives to explore the available experimental data under various scientific questions. Therefore, any new initiative in glycosciences should be established under the open access philosophy.     

Highly sensitive multistage mass spectrometry enables small-scale analysis of protein glycosylation from two-dimensional polyacrylamide gels

Structural characterization of glycoproteins remains among the most challenging areas of glycomics due to the requirement of large quantities of samples and laborious biochemical steps involved in the analytical procedure. Here we report the structural characterization of glycoproteins separated on a 2-D gel by using a MALDI-QIT-TOF MS where QIT is quadrupole IT. The combination of MALDI-ion source and QIT appears to generate a unique tendency to cause fragmentation of glycopeptides without collision-induced dissociation. The majority of such fragmentations observed in our study result from the cleavage of sugar linkages, but not of peptide-peptide or peptide-sugar linkages. This unique feature allows us to perform pseudo-MS3 analysis of a fragmented glycopeptide. A small gel spot of a glycoprotein in the abundance range of low picomoles was enough for the mass spectrometer to analyze fragmentation pathway of the sugar linkage and peptide backbone. In this study, we demonstrate direct determination of glycosylation sites and N-linked glycan-sequences of the tryptic glycopeptides of Drosophila glycoproteins. Glycopeptides with various MWs up to approximately 4000 Da were suitable for structural analysis, including its attachment site and the amino acid sequence, of the glycopeptide through multistage mass spectrometric analysis.     

Analysis of γ‐globulin mobility on routine clinical CE equipment: Exploring its molecular basis and potential clinical utility

A study was conducted on the variability of γ‐globulin mobility in serum protein electrophoresis and its molecular basis. We found that the migration time of γ‐globulins can be reproducibly determined (CV=1.1%) on clinical CE equipment. Moreover, we found a significant difference (p<0.001) in the migration of γ‐globulins between chronic liver disease patients (n=98) and a healthy reference group (n=47). Serum immunoglobulins were purified from these patients' sera using protein L ‐agarose and their glycosylation was studied using CE on a DNA sequencer. This glycomics approach revealed that several non‐sialylated N‐glycans show a moderate Pearson correlation coefficient (r=0.2–0.4) with the migration time of γ‐globulins. Their sialylated structures correlate negatively (r=?0.2 to ?0.3). Immunoglobulins are significantly more sialylated in the healthy reference group compared with the patients (p<0.001). We estimated that sialylation heterogeneity contributes about 36% to the molecular variance (carbohydrates and amino acid composition) that affects the electrophoretic mobility of immunoglobulins. This is the first report on the migration time of γ‐globulins on a clinical CE instrument and its potential clinical value to the routinely analyzed serum protein CE profiles.     

Harnessing glycomics technologies: integrating structure with function for glycan characterization

Glycans, or complex carbohydrates, are a ubiquitous class of biological molecule which impinge on a variety of physiological processes ranging from signal transduction to tissue development and microbial pathogenesis. In comparison to DNA and proteins, glycans present unique challenges to the study of their structure and function owing to their complex and heterogeneous structures and the dominant role played by multivalency in their sequence-specific biological interactions. Arising from these challenges, there is a need to integrate information from multiple complementary methods to decode structure-function relationships. Focusing on acidic glycans, we describe here key glycomics technologies for characterizing their structural attributes, including linkage, modifications, and topology, as well as for elucidating their role in biological processes. Two cases studies, one involving sialylated branched glycans and the other sulfated glycosaminoglycans, are used to highlight how integration of orthogonal information from diverse datasets enables rapid convergence of glycan characterization for development of robust structure-function relationships.     

Review of a current role of mass spectrometry for proteome research

This review is intended to give readers a snapshot of current mass spectrometry for proteomics research. It covers a brief history of mass spectrometry proteomic research, peptidomics and proteomics for biomarker search, quantitative proteomics, proteomics with post-translational modification and future perspective of proteomics.     

Identifying cancer biomarkers by mass spectrometry-based glycomics

Correlations between aberrant glycosylation and cancer have been established for decades. The major advances in mass spectrometry (MS) and separation science have rapidly advanced detailed characterization of the changes associated with cancer development and progression. Over the past 10 years, many reports have described MS-based glycomic methods directed toward comparing the glycomic profiles of different human specimens collected from disease-free individuals and patients with cancers. Glycomic profiling of glycoproteins isolated from human specimens originating from disease-free individuals and patients with cancers have also been performed. Profiling of native, labeled, and permethylated glycans has been acquired using MALDI-MS and LC-MS. This review focuses on describing, discussing, and evaluating the different glycomic methods employed to characterize and quantify glycomic changes associated with cancers of different organs, including breast, colon, esophagus, liver, ovarian, pancreas, and prostate.     

Effect of fluidic transport on the reaction kinetics in lectin microarrays

Lectins are the proteins which can distinguish glycosylation patterns. They are frequently used as biomarkers for progressions of several diseases including cancer. As the lectin microarray based prognosis devices miniaturize the process of glycoprofiling, it is anticipated that their performance can be augmented by integration with microfluidic framework. This is analogous to microfluidics based DNA arrays. However, unlike small oligonucleotide microarrays, it remains uncertain whether the binding reaction-kinetic parameters can be considered invariant of imposed hydrodynamics, for relatively larger and structure sensitive molecules such as lectins. Here we show, using two standard lectins namely Concanavalin A and Abrus Agglutinin, that the steady state binding efficiency unexpectedly declines beyond a critical shear rate magnitude. This observation can be explained only if the associated reaction constants are presumed to be functions of hydrodynamic parameters. We methodically deduce the shear rate dependence of association and dissociation constants from the comparison of experimental and model-simulation trends. The aforementioned phenomena are perceived to be the consequences of strong hydrodynamic perturbations, culminating into molecular structural distortion. The exploration, therefore, reveals a unique coupling between reaction kinetics and hydrodynamics for biomacromolecules and provides a generic scheme towards futuristic microfluidics-coupled biomedical assays.     

Syntheses of glycodendrimers having scyllo-inositol as the scaffold

Synthetic glycoconjugated dendrimers have emerged as important functional glycomimetics for studying multivalency effects in the cell-cell communications. We report herein, a synthetic route to functionalized glycodendrimers with scyllo-inositol as the scaffold, which have a directed geometry; one side of the dendrimers is designed for ready attachment to the AFM probe/solid matrix, and the other to have a varying number of a sugar.