PNNL

Abstract

Glycans represent an important class of biomolecules that serve numerous biological functions in plants, fungi, mammals, and bacteria. Glycomics remains severely hampered by the tremendous degree of structural diversity and complexity amongst glycans, thus limiting their accurate characterization. There remains a pressing need to overcome this analytical bottleneck and develop new, sensitive and creative methods for the high-resolution separation of isomeric glycoforms to better understand their true biological roles. To address these challenges, we have implemented our new structures for lossless ion manipulations (SLIM) serpentine ultra-long path with extended routing (SUPER) ion mobility-mass spectrometry (i.e. SLIM SUPER IM-MS) platform to achieve much higher resolution glycan analyses. All isomeric glycoforms assessed were successfully resolved from one another on a rapid timescale (