Qualitative and quantitative assessment on the use of magnetic nanoparticles for glycopeptide enrichment

Glycoproteomics represent the field of study of the dynamic changes occurring among glycoconjugates within the cellular compartments. Changes in glycosylation have been linked to various diseases, including metastatic carcinomas in which the 9 carbon sialic acid moiety has been shown to play a prominent role. The common method used to study these aberrant changes most often includes a mass spectrometer at some stage in the workflow. However, serum samples contain many proteins which inhibit the analysis of these glycosylation changes, and ergo, enrichment steps are employed as a measure to help alleviate this ailment. Routinely, this is accomplished using lectins, either alone or in combination, to retrieve proteins with specific sugar linkages within the serum sample. This methodology, although known to be very specific, requires many washing steps, making it a cumbersome addition to a high throughput workflow. Presented here is an alternative protocol using custom-made amine functionalized magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) which are nearly 4× smaller than those used before for similar purposes. The developed protocol is based on both hydrophilic interaction and weak anion exchange principles, allowing it to target glycopeptides but, more specifically, those which contain sialylation. For quantification purposes, tandem mass tags from Thermo Scientific were utilized to compare the enrichment efficiencies between the magnetic nanoparticle method and a commercially available glycopeptide enrichment kit offered through EMD Millipore. The MNP method is fast (~10 min) and simple and can quantitatively and qualitatively enrich sialylated glycopeptides more than the commercially available kit.