New Mass Spectrometry-Based Approaches to Illuminate Glycosylation

Dear Colleagues,

Glycosylation is one of the most prevalent and complicated forms of post-translational modification, and is implicated in many biological processes and diseases. Glycans are one of the four key biologically relevant molecules that are involved in a plethora of biological functions, including how our bodies fight and recognize viruses and how proteins move within our body, with significant attention paid to their influence on the efficacy of therapeutics. Moreover, the recent outbreak of COVID-19 has brought to the fore the importance of the study of glycosylation. Considering the biological importance of glycans, techniques for the accurate structural analysis of glycosylation on a broad scale are essential in the biopharmaceutical industry and beyond. However, the accurate characterization of glycans is hindered by the lack of high-throughput, high-resolution, and robust analytical techniques in the field of glycomics. Unlike the fields of genomics and proteomics, research in glycoscience has lagged because of the complexity of the glycans and the lack of automated high-throughput workflows. Genomics and proteomics only present a part of the understanding needed to explain important questions in biology, human health, and medicine. Though mass spectrometry is the go-to tool for studying glycosylation, some areas, such as O-linked glycosylation, remain challenging to study. The massive structural heterogeneity of glycans, along with the lack of an enzyme for deglycosylating O-linked glycans, has hindered their characterization. Thus, it is crucial to explore mass spectrometry-based approaches for glycan profiling, and to develop high-throughput screening methods, cost-effective enzymes for the deglycosylation of O-linked glycans, analytical methods to identify glycan biomarkers, and glyco-therapeutics that can be utilized by academia and industry alike.

In this context, this Special Issue, entitled “New Mass Spectrometry-based Approaches to Illuminate Glycosylation”, aims to gather new insights, studies, and innovative mass spectrometry-based methods and technologies for glycan analysis, glycan structural analysis, biomarker discovery from both simple (e.g., purified proteins, peptides, antibodies) and complex starting materials (e.g., red blood cells, serum, plasma), and data acquisition and analysis to mitigate gaps and bottlenecks in biomedical research.

Dr. Monita Muralidharan
Dr. Mayank Saraswat
Dr. Abhigya Mookherjee
Guest Editors

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• glycoproteomics
• glycomics
• LC-MS/MS
• biomarker discovery
• glycans in diseases (Alzheimer‘s, neurodegeneration
• cancer
• immunology
• tumor evasion
• inflammation
• liquid biopsy
• glycoproteomics in health and disease
• N- and O-glycans
• lectin-affinity chromatography
• glycoprotein enrichment
• computational methods
• data analysis/visualization