Analysis of serum protein glycosylation with antibody-lectin microarray for high-throughput biomarker screening

The complexity of carbohydrate structures and their derivatives makes the study of the glycome a challenging subset of proteomic research. The microarray platform has become an essential tool to characterize glycan structure and to study glycosylation-related biological interactions, by using probes as a means to interrogate the spotted or captured glycosylated molecules on the arrays. The high-throughput and reproducible nature of microarray platforms have been highlighted by their extensive applications in the field of biomarker validation, where a large number of samples must be analyzed multiple times. This chapter presents an antibody-lectin microarray approach, which allows the efficient, multiplexed study of the glycosylation of multiple individual proteins from complex mixtures with both fluorescence labeling detection and label-free detection based on mass spectrometry.