Isolation and Purification of Glycans from Natural Sources for Positive Identification

The great structural diversity of glycans demands powerful analytical methodologies, such as different combinations of capillary separations with mass spectrometry (MS), to identify the correct structures involved in key glycan interactions of biological importance. Precise structural assignments, in turn, necessitate the availability of pure authentic glycans as absolute analytical standards. It is particularly evident with the cases of glycan isomerism, which are seemingly involved in the search for glyco-biomarkers of human diseases. While novel synthetic approaches are being developed toward the acquisition of new glycan standards, it is still prudent, feasible, and profitable to consider the isolation of pure glycans from some hitherto unexplored natural sources. It is demonstrated here that recycling high-performance liquid chromatography (R-HPLC) can accomplish isolation of isomeric glycans to be used as analytical standards or valuable reagents in the fabrication of glycan arrays for biomarker discovery. 133 This article is part of the Proceedings of the Beilstein Glyco-Bioinformatics Symposium 2013. www.proceedings.beilstein-symposia.org Discovering the Subtleties of Sugars June 10 – 14, 2013, Potsdam, Germany