Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 7, 2026

Mass Spectrometric Analysis of Glycosphingolipid Antigens
Published on: April 16, 2013
Differentiating N-linked glycan structural isomers in metastatic and nonmetastatic tumor cells using sequential mass
Justin M Prien1, Leanne C Huysentruyt, David J Ashline
1Division of Molecular, Cellular, and Biomedical Sciences, The Glycomics Center, Durham, NH 03824, USA.
Abstract:
In an effort to understand the role of molecular glycosylation in cancer a murine model has been used to characterize and fingerprint malignancies in established cell lines that manifest all the hallmarks of metastatic disease: spontaneous development, local invasion, intravasation, immune system survival, extravasation, and secondary tumor formation involving liver, kidney, spleen, lung, and brain. Using astrocyte cell controls, we compared N-linked glycosylation from a nonmetastatic brain tumor cell line and two different metastatic brain tumor cells. Selected ions in each profile were disassembled by ion trap mass spectrometry (MS(n)) which exhibited multiple structural differences between each tissue. These unique structures were identified within isomeric compositions as pendant nonreducing termini of di- and trisaccharide fragments, probably transparent to a tandem MS approach but distinctively not to sequential ion trap MS(n) detection.
Related Concept Videos
Peptide Identification Using Tandem Mass Spectrometry
This technique helps gather information regarding the protein from which the peptide was obtained and to study the peptides’ amino acid sequence. Identifying peptides from a complex mixture is an important component of the growing field of...
Tandem Mass Spectrometry
Mass Spectrometry: Complex Analysis
GC–MS is a powerful hyphenated method commonly used in forensics and environmental...
High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry (HRMS)
