Abstract:

Glycosylation is one of the most common posttranslational modifications, found on more than 50% of proteins. The majority of glycoproteins are involved in protein-protein interactions on the extra cellular surface that influence growth factors; cellular communication; hormone activities; immunological evasion and tumor progression as examples. Due to its importance, glycoproteins are a potential source for biomarker discovery in order to detect diseases at early stage and to increase patience surveillance. It is known that disease progression is often related to pathway dysregulation including changes of the glycosylation extension as well as the carbohydrate structure. Nowadays, the strategy adopted for glycoproteins studies comprises enrichment and standard proteomic analysis using mass spectrometry (MS). However using this approach, it is obtained a small quantity of peptides containing the glyco motif compared to the total amount of peptides which makes the glycopeptides characterization difficult. For this reason it is important to propose methodologies to enrich glycopeptides or glycoproteins from others.