Spatial Glycomics and Kidney Disease

Glycans are critical for the kidney's physiological and pathological cellular functions, and our ability to see their spatial distributions within tissues has helped us reveal how these carbohydrate moieties are involved in many of these processes. This review discusses the role of different types of glycans in kidney biology and disease, common approaches used for glycan imaging, and how glycan imaging has helped us better understand kidney pathology. We mainly focus on emerging methods using mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) because this technology is untargeted and provides complete information on glycan composition compared to the other methods, such as lectin and metabolite labeling, which are targeted and often inform only on the specific part of a glycan structure. We especially focus on protein N-glycosylation, as this is one of the most common post-translational modifications, and these moieties play a vital role in renal structure and function. The recent advancements in MSI of N-glycans we reviewed have provided new insights into the pathophysiology of the kidney and paved the way for clinical application.