Resolving Isomeric Glycopeptide Glycoforms with Hydrophilic Interaction Chromatography (HILIC).

The ability to resolve glycans while attached to tryptic peptides would greatly facilitate glycoproteomics, as this would enable site-specific glycan characterization. Peptide/glycopeptide separations are typically performed using reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RPLC), where retention is driven by hydrophobic interaction. As the hydrophilic glycans do not interact significantly with the RPLC stationary phase, it is difficult to resolve glycopeptides that differ only in their glycan structure, even when these differences are large. Alternatively, glycans interact extensively with the stationary phases used in hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC), and consequently, differences in glycan structure have profound chromatographic shifts in this chromatographic mode. Here, we evaluate HILIC for the separation of isomeric glycopeptide mixtures that have the same peptide backbone but isomeric glycans. Hydrophilic functional groups on both the peptide and the glycan interact with the HILIC stationary phase, and thus, changes to either of these moieties can alter the chromatographic behavior of a glycopeptide. The interactive processes permit glycopeptides to be resolved from each other based on differences in their amino acid sequences and/or their attached glycans. The separations of glycans in HILIC are sufficient to permit resolution of isomeric N-glycan structures, such as sialylated N-glycan isomers differing in α2-3 and α2-6 linkages, while these glycans remain attached to peptides.

An arginine-functionalized stationary phase for hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography.

An arginine-functionalized stationary phase for hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) has been prepared for the first time by clicking arginine onto silica gel. It offers an efficient separation of organic acids, nucleotides and sugars. More interestingly, it exhibited excellent selectivity and enrichment toward acidic glycopeptides, even at a ratio of 1 : 150 to non-glycopeptides.

Highly specific enrichment of N-glycoproteome through a nonreductive amination reaction using Fe3O4@SiO2-aniline nanoparticles.

A novel method based on the conjunction of aldehydes from oxidized glycopeptides to aniline groups on magnetic nanoparticles via nonreductive amination is reported for the highly selective enrichment of N-glycopeptides. For the first time, a nonreductive amination reaction has been introduced into N-glycoproteome extraction, and correspondingly a new type of aniline-functionalized nanoparticle has been designed and synthesized.

Liquid chromatography-selected reaction monitoring (LC-SRM) approach for the separation and quantitation of sialylated N-glycans linkage isomers.

The study of N-linked glycans is among the most challenging bioanalytical tasks because of their complexity and variety. The presence of glycoform families that differ only in branching and/or linkage position makes the identification and quantitation of individual glycans exceedingly difficult. Quantitation of these individual glycans is important because changes in the abundance of these isomers are often associated with significant biomedical events. For instance, previous studies have shown that the ratio of α2-3 to α2-6 linked sialic acid (SA) plays an important role in cancer biology. Consequently, quantitative methods to detect alterations in the ratios of glycans based on their SA linkages could serve as a diagnostic tool in oncology, yet traditional glycomic profiling cannot readily differentiate between these linkage isomers. Here, we present a liquid chromatography-selected reaction monitoring (LC-SRM) approach that we demonstrate is capable of quantitating the individual SA linkage isomers. The LC method is capable of separating sialylated N-glycan isomers differing in α2-3 and α2-6 linkages using a novel superficially porous particle (Fused-Core) Penta-HILIC (hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography) column. SRM detection provides the relative quantitation of each SA linkage isomer, and minimizes interferences from coeluting glycans that are problematic for UV/Fluorescence based quantitation. With our approach, the relative quantitation of each SA linkage isomer is obtained from a straightforward liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) experiment.