BlotGlyco^® and glycoblotting for large scale, high throughput glycomics

Abstract

Expression patterns of glycoforms are known to be dependent on the various individual states, such as development, ageing, and disease. Transcriptomics and proteomics have been generally standardized to analyze the expression of certain DNAs and proteins, facilitating potential applications for diagnosis and disease treatment. However, no such convenient methods capable of analyzing glycomics are available currently. Glycobiology is one of the most important subjects in post-genomic era, and methods for glycan analyses have been steadily improved by advancement in mass spectrometry (MS). Nevertheless, a practical procedure for large number of glycan samples that fulfills the requirements of the high speed and high yield was unavailable, thus, limiting development of useful glycomics of certain biological materials, e.g. serum and tissue biopsy.
To alleviate this problem, it is highly desirable to develop a standardized methodology to achieve high-speed quantitative and qualitative profiling of glycan expression patterns in the biological materials. Recently, a chemo-selective glycan enrichment technology, termed glycoblotting, has been developed to purify oligosaccharides derived from glycoproteins in highly effective quantitative manner, enabling profiling of serum glycans in a simple manner. This method is also applicable to automated analysis of multiple samples simultaneously. It flawlessly combines isolation and labeling of oligosaccharides suited for conventional analytical methods including MS analysis. We believe that the glycoblotting technique and the beads specifically designed for it (BlotGlyco) is an innovative approach in the “real world” glycan preparation. Glycoblotting and its related technologies would make a great contribution not only to the glycobiology community, but also for glycan-related biomarker search as well as for glycan-related drug development.