Medicinal-Pharmaceutical Chemistry Commons^™

New Technologies For Glycomic Analysis: Toward A Systematic Understanding Of The Glycome, John Rakus, Lara Mahal

John F. Rakus

Carbohydrates are the most difficult class of biological molecules to study by high-throughput methods owing to the chemical similarities between the constituent monosaccharide building blocks, template-less biosynthesis, and the lack of clearly identifiable consensus sequences for the glycan modification of cohorts of glycoproteins. These molecules are crucial for a wide variety of cellular processes ranging from cell-cell communication to immunity, and they are altered in disease states such as cancer and inflammation. Thus, there has been a dedicated effort to develop glycan analysis into a high-throughput analytical field termed glycomics. Herein we highlight major advances in applying separation, mass spectrometry, …