A general and sensitive chemical method for sequencing the glycosyl residues of complex carbohydrates

This paper describes a new glycosyl-sequencing method. This method was made possible by the ability to fractionate complex mixtures of peralkylated oligosaccharides by reversed-phase, high-pressure liquid chromatography. The fractionation ability of the reversed-phase system allows the isolation and subsequent unambiguous identification by g.l.c.-m.s. of disaccharides, almost all trisaccharides, and, in some cases, tetrasaccharides generated by successive partial acid hydrolysis, reduction, and ethylation of a permethylated, complex carbohydrate. As these small oligosaccharides overlap within the unhydrolyzed, complex carbohydrate, the oligosaccharide sequences may be pieced together, and, with the glycosyl-linkage composition of the intact complex carbohydrate, can be used to determine the glycosyl sequence of the complex carbohydrate. The details of the sequencing method are illustrated by the elucidation of the glycosyl sequences of three complex carbohydrates. These examples demonstrate the wide variety of complex carbohydrates whose structures can be ascertained by the new sequencing technique. Two of the examples are the commercially available polysaccharides, lichenan and xanthan, whose structures have already been reported. The other example is a nonasaccharide derived from xyloglucan, a structural polymer of plant cell-walls. The glycosyl residues of the complex carbohydrates studied include hexosyl, deoxyhexosyl, pentosyl, glycosyluronic, and pyruvic acetal-substituted hexosyl residues. It will be demonstrated that the new glycosyl-sequencing technique is not compromised by the presence, in the carbohydrate to be analyzed, of glycosyl linkages possessing very different acid labilities. Two major advantages of this sequencing technique are that it is relatively rapid and that it requires only milligram quantities of carbohydrate.