Abstract
Rapid and sensitive technology for the analysis of protein glycosylation is a major requirement in glycomics and for the discovery of disease-associated glycan and glycoprotein biomarkers. Recently, we have developed an automated apparatus, AutoGlycoCutter (AGC), which enables rapid release of O-linked glycans from core protein as a reactive reducing oligosaccharide (Matsuno et al., Anal. Biochem., 362, 2007, 245-257. Yamada et al., Anal. Biochem., 371, 2007, 52-61). In this review, performance of the AGC and its usefulness were demonstrated based on the analytical results of O-linked glycans in some standard mucin-type glycoproteins or proteoglycan-type glycans. In addition, we also show two applications of the present method. One is the rapid and sensitive analysis of mucin-type glycan profiles in various cultured cancer cell lines, and the other is the development of a device for high-throughput analysis of multiple samples by hyphenation of AGC to the auto spotter for MALDI-TOF MS.
