Glycan analysis by reversible reaction to hydrazide beads and mass spectrometry

Investigation into glycoproteins and their associated glycans is the key to understanding the function of glycoproteins in biological pathways and disease development. Current methods for glycan analysis are generally based on multiple preparation processes to separate glycans from proteins and other molecules prior to analysis. During the multistep purification processes, glycans are continuously lost and the procedure increases the difficulty for accurate quantitative analysis of glycans. Here we describe the development of a novel technique, which uses hydrazide beads to capture glycans. It is based on the conjugation of glycans to hydrazide beads through the formation of reversible hydrazone, washing out unbound nonglycans, then releasing captured glycans by acids. The results showed that the glycans were able to be isolated from concatenate peptides by using hydrazide beads. This technique was also applied to the analysis of glycans from sera sample. The integrated capture-release on the solid-phase simplifies the procedure for glycan preparation from a complex mixture and can be a powerful tool for glycan analysis.