William R. Alley

High-sensitivity Analytical Approaches for the Structural Characterization of Glycoproteins

1.1. General Considerations Structural intricacies of carbohydrate molecules and their propensity to form varied linkages, substitutions, and branching patterns have fascinated many generations of chemists, as have the three-dimensional aspects of carbohydrate interactions with other biomolecules. The steadily increasing biochemical knowledge in this area has further added to the increasing importance of the field now referred to as “glycobiology” or, more generally, “glycoscience”. Yet, most of the emphasis over the last 50 years or so has been on two other classes of important biopolymers, namely nucleic acids and proteins. However, in the “post-genomic era”, complex carbohydrates can no longer be neglected, as it is becoming clear to many scientists that most mammalian proteins are glycosylated, and microbial systems and plants can have their own unique monosaccharide building blocks and special ways they can be interconnected and branched into unusual structures. Throughout evolution and the development of living organisms, glycoconjugates must have played major roles, no doubt due to their unusual biological selectivities, which, in turn, could well be due to the enormous information capacity of the “sugar code”.1,2 Throughout the 1980s, the multilateral importance of glycoconjugates in biology and medicine was recognized,3-6 albeit with an understanding that only new methodological approaches and systematic investigations would further define new vistas and provide intimate knowledge of how complex carbohydrates participate in all life processes. Today’s glycoscience is a multidisciplinary undertaking in which chemistry is expected to have an important role to describe the most complex structural aspects of sugars and their conjugates with other biological molecules. While the biological and biomedical relevance of studying glycosylation and sugar–protein and sugar–sugar interactions will undoubtedly be guided by advances in other respective fields (immunology, cancer research, parasitology, cell biology, and developmental biology, among others), the chemical disciplines’ two major tasks are to (a) isolate and structurally characterize biologically important glycoconjugates and (b) synthesize carbohydrate structures for biochemical investigations, enabling technologies and medical applications and providing new therapeutics. While the goals and directions of carbohydrate synthesis have been summarized elsewhere,7-11 the focus of our review has been on glycoanalytical chemistry. The synthetic and bioanalytical directions are not mutually exclusive, as new structural findings will undoubtedly provide further rationale for synthetic efforts and these, in turn, the availability of standards for structural verification. Since publication of the review on structural investigations of glycoconjugates at high sensitivity12 in these pages a decade ago, the field of analytical glycobiology has seen dramatic changes in its scope and depth. It is widely appreciated within the glycoscience community and increasingly by others that both new techniques and instrumentation and the established (albeit optimized) analytical methodologies have played very important roles in advancing the science of glycoconjugates to its current stage. Due to their different physical and chemical characteristics, the main classes of glycoconjugates, i.e. glycoproteins, glycolipids, polysaccharides, and proteoglycans with their highly charged constituents, glycosaminoglycans, demand somewhat specialized analytical and structural elucidation approaches. Our review will largely be focused on glycoproteins and their associated glycans, hoping that other scientists will describe the analytical aspects of the remaining glycoconjugate biomolecules elsewhere. The early advances in proteomics, the scientific area mostly preoccupied with identification and structural characterization of proteins, have led to diverse activities in protein post-transitional modifications (PTMs), which are often associated with important biological activities. Glycosylation of proteins is arguably the most widely spread and functionally most intriguing PTM in nature. It is already known that certain glycosylation patterns in proteins give rise to functional variance, with far-reaching consequences for health-disease issues, immunological disorders, toxicity effects, microbial invasion processes, etc. To investigate any of these highly important processes in sufficient molecular detail, analytical techniques capable of a high degree of structural elucidation and measurement sensitivity are currently needed. Within the plethora of new “-omics fields” (genomics, transcriptomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, etc.), the fields of glycoproteomics and glycomics have started to assume their respectable roles. Analytical glycobiology, representing both glycomics and glycoproteomics, now shares access to new measurement technologies that enable characterization and quantification of molecular processes in living organisms. Extensive glycomic and glycoproteomic data that can nowadays be generated with modern techniques and instrumentation are likely to enrich the “systems biology” approach.13-17 Both fields have started to contribute substantially to a better understanding of multicellular interactions in eukaryotic systems and important issues pertaining to human health and disease.18-23 Additionally, the long-held view that glycosylation is unimportant in prokaryotic systems is no longer defensible.24,25 Since our previous review12 in this journal, much progress has been achieved in terms of methodological developments toward better, more informative, and more sensitive measurements of glycoproteins and their glycan components. In addition, many conceptually important applications of new tools already point to the future needs for dealing with the enormous complexity of glycopeptides and oligosaccharide mixtures extracted from biological tissues and physiological fluids. The relatively recent interest of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries in recombinant glycoproteins, such as monoclonal antibodies, for treatment of cancer and other diseases,26-30 demands the use and further development of glycomic and glycoproteomic analytical procedures as well. Similarly to our previous report,12 the current review has been organized to discuss separately recent advances in glycoproteomics and glycomics, dealing first with the isolation and direct analysis of glycoproteins, followed by the description of advances in glycopeptide analysis and determination of the sites of glycosylation, and moving toward the analysis of complex glycan mixtures. Even more today than 10 years ago, mass spectrometry (MS) is the most prominent methodology in the arsenal of glycoprotein analysis tools. A number of new MS techniques, previously unexplored or insufficiently developed, are now at the center of attention of glycobiologists. At the sensitivity levels required by contemporary glycobiology, MS and tandem MS (MSn) techniques are currently the only means to provide reliable structural information. Carbohydrate derivatization (chemical modification of carbohydrates at microscale) uniquely enables certain MS measurements in terms of enhanced sensitivity and structural information. Due to the enormous “chemical space” for carbohydrate structural complexity,1,2 MS alone, no matter how sophisticated, is unlikely to provide all needed answers. However, in combinations with modern separation methodologies (different forms of chromatography and electrophoresis) that provide unique component resolution in time and space, MS detection and identification capabilities become enormously enriched. The past decade has seen substantial improvements in the chromatographic analysis of complex carbohydrates: (1) transition from the conventional-scale columns to capillary column dimensions, or even microchips, with the resulting gains in mass sensitivity of measurements; and (2) rapidly increasing use of stable and reliable hydrophilic column materials and graphitized carbon adsorbents. Further advances in capillary chromatographic separations pertain to effective resolution of very complex mixtures as well as the frequently needed separation of different isomers. Chromatographic advances of the recent years also relate to simple purifications of samples (analysis steps now often referred to as solid-phase extraction, or SPE) or the more sophisticated microcolumn lectin or affinity materials needed in group separations and preconcentration of certain glycoproteins for analysis. The past decade has also witnessed a rapid development of glycan array technologies, in which the surface-bound glycan structures (either synthesized or isolated from natural mixtures) are presented to glycan-binding proteins in biological samples.31-33 While these enabling technologies are novel and exciting, they will not be covered in this review, which primarily emphasizes techniques leading to structural elucidation of glycoproteins. Likewise, immunologically based measurements will not be discussed.

Characterization of glycopeptides by combining collision-induced dissociation and electron-transfer dissociation mass spectrometry data

Structural characterization of a glycopeptide is not easily attained through collision-induced dissociation (CID), due to the extensive fragmentation of glycan moieties and minimal fragmentation of peptide backbones. In this study, we have exploited the potential of electron-transfer dissociation (ETD) as a complementary approach for peptide fragmentation. Model glycoproteins, including ribonuclease B, fetuin, horseradish peroxidase, and haptoglobin, were used here. In ETD, radical anions transfer an electron to the peptide backbone and induce cleavage of the N-Calpha bond. The glycan moiety is retained on the peptide backbone, being largely unaffected by the ETD process. Accordingly, ETD allows not only the identification of the amino acid sequence of a glycopeptide, but also the unambiguous assignment of its glycosylation site. When data acquired from both fragmentation techniques are combined, it is possible to characterize comprehensively the entire glycopeptide. This is being achieved with a mass spectrometer capable of alternating between CID and ETD on-the-fly during an LC/MS/MS analysis. This is demonstrated here with several tryptic glycopeptides.

Chip-based Reversed-phase Liquid Chromatography−Mass Spectrometry of Permethylated N-Linked Glycans: A Potential Methodology for Cancer-biomarker Discovery

The study of protein glycosylation in biological fluids and tissues has substantial medical importance, as changes in glycan structures have now been associated with a number of diseases. Quantification of glycomic-profile changes is becoming increasingly important in the search for disease biomarkers. Here, we report a highly reproducible combination of a glycomic sample preparation/solid-phase derivatization of glycoprotein-derived N-linked glycans with their subsequent microchip-based separation and mass-spectrometric (MS) measurements. Following our previously described reductive beta-elimination for O-linked glycans with ammonia-borane complex to reduce N-linked structures, the N-linked alditol structures are effectively methylated in dimethylformamide medium to avoid artefacts in MS measurements. Reversed-phase microfluidic liquid chromatography (LC) of methylated N-linked oligosaccharide alditols resolved some closely related structures into regular retention increments, aiding in their structural assignments. Optimized LC gradients, together with nanospray MS, have been applied here in the quantitative measurements of N-linked glycans in blood serum, distinguishing breast cancer patients from control individuals.

Glycomic analysis of sialic acid linkages in glycans derived from blood serum glycoproteins.

A number of alterations to the normal glycomic profile have been previously described for a number of diseases and disorders, thus underscoring the medical importance of studying the glycans associated with proteins present in biological samples. An important alteration in cancer progression is an increased level of alpha2,6-sialylation, which aids in increasing the metastatic potential of tumor cells. Here we report a glycomic method that selectively amidates alpha2,6-linked sialic acids, while those that are alpha2,3-linked undergo spontaneous lactonization. Following subsequent permethylation, MALDI-TOF MS analysis revealed that many sialylated glycans present on glycoproteins found in blood serum featured increased levels of alpha2,6-sialylation in breast cancer samples. On the basis of the altered ratios of alpha2,3-linked to alpha2,6-linked sialic acids, many of these glycans became diagnostically relevant when they did not act as such indicators when based on traditional glycomic profiling alone.

Interlaboratory Study on Differential Analysis of Protein Glycosylation by Mass Spectrometry: the ABRF Glycoprotein Research Multi-Institutional Study 2012

One of the principal goals of glycoprotein research is to correlate glycan structure and function. Such correlation is necessary in order for one to understand the mechanisms whereby glycoprotein structure elaborates the functions of myriad proteins. The accurate comparison of glycoforms and quantification of glycosites are essential steps in this direction. Mass spectrometry has emerged as a powerful analytical technique in the field of glycoprotein characterization. Its sensitivity, high dynamic range, and mass accuracy provide both quantitative and sequence/structural information. As part of the 2012 ABRF Glycoprotein Research Group study, we explored the use of mass spectrometry and ancillary methodologies to characterize the glycoforms of two sources of human prostate specific antigen (PSA). PSA is used as a tumor marker for prostate cancer, with increasing blood levels used to distinguish between normal and cancer states. The glycans on PSA are believed to be biantennary N-linked, and it has been observed that prostate cancer tissues and cell lines contain more antennae than their benign counterparts. Thus, the ability to quantify differences in glycosylation associated with cancer has the potential to positively impact the use of PSA as a biomarker. We studied standard peptide-based proteomics/glycomics methodologies, including LC-MS/MS for peptide/glycopeptide sequencing and label-free approaches for differential quantification. We performed an interlaboratory study to determine the ability of different laboratories to correctly characterize the differences between glycoforms from two different sources using mass spectrometry methods. We used clustering analysis and ancillary statistical data treatment on the data sets submitted by participating laboratories to obtain a consensus of the glycoforms and abundances. The results demonstrate the relative strengths and weaknesses of top-down glycoproteomics, bottom-up glycoproteomics, and glycomics methods.

Use of activated graphitized carbon chips for liquid chromatography/mass spectrometric and tandem mass spectrometric analysis of tryptic glycopeptides

Protein glycosylation has a significant medical importance as changes in glycosylation patterns have been associated with a number of diseases. Therefore, monitoring potential changes in glycan profiles, and the microheterogeneities associated with glycosylation sites, are becoming increasingly important in the search for disease biomarkers. Highly efficient separations and sensitive methods must be developed to effectively monitor changes in the glycoproteome. These methods must not discriminate against hydrophobic or hydrophilic analytes. The use of activated graphitized carbon as a desalting media and a stationary phase for the purification and the separation of glycans, and as a stationary phase for the separation of small glycopeptides, has previously been reported. Here, we describe the use of activated graphitized carbon as a stationary phase for the separation of hydrophilic tryptic glycopeptides, employing a chip-based liquid chromatographic (LC) system. The capabilities of both activated graphitized carbon and C(18) LC chips for the characterization of the glycopeptides appeared to be comparable. Adequate retention time reproducibility was achieved for both packing types in the chip format. However, hydrophilic glycopeptides were preferentially retained on the activated graphitized carbon chip, thus allowing the identification of hydrophilic glycopeptides which were not effectively retained on C(18) chips. On the other hand, hydrophobic glycopeptides were better retained on C(18) chips. Characterization of the glycosylation sites of glycoproteins possessing both hydrophilic and hydrophobic glycopeptides is comprehensively achieved using both media. This is feasible considering the limited amount of sample required per analysis (<1 pmol). The performance of both media also appeared comparable when analyzing a four-protein mixture. Similar sequence coverage and MASCOT ion scores were observed for all proteins when using either stationary phase.

Smoking and Lung Cancer-induced Changes in N-Glycosylation of Blood Serum Proteins

Glycosylation is a key post-translational protein modification which appears important in malignant transformation and tumor metastasis. Abnormal glycosylation of different proteins can often be measured in the blood serum. In this study, we extend our serum-based structural investigations to samples provided by patients diagnosed with lung cancer, paying particular attention to the effects of smoking on the serum glycomic traces. Following a battery of glycomic tests, we find that several fucosylated tetra-antennary structures with varying degrees of sialylation are increased in their abundances in control samples provided by the former smokers, with further elevations in the lung cancer patients who were former smokers. Further detailed investigations demonstrated that the level of outer-arm fucosylation was elevated in the control samples of the former smokers and again in the lung cancer samples provided by the former smokers. This trend was particularly noticeable for the tri- and tetra-antennary structures. Different ratios of sialylation linkages were also observed that could be correlated with the different states of health and smoking status. Decreases in the abundance levels of isomers with two and three α2,3-linked sialic acids and an increased abundance of an isomer with two α2,6-linked sialic acids were noted for a fucosylated tri-sialylated tri-antennary glycan. These results demonstrate the long-term effects of smoking on glycomic profiles and that this factor needs to be considered in these and other serum-based analyses.

Structural Glycomic Analyses at High Sensitivity: A Decade of Progress

The field of glycomics has recently advanced in response to the urgent need for structural characterization and quantification of complex carbohydrates in biologically and medically important applications. The recent success of analytical glycobiology at high sensitivity reflects numerous advances in biomolecular mass spectrometry and its instrumentation, capillary and microchip separation techniques, and microchemical manipulations of carbohydrate reactivity. The multimethodological approach appears to be necessary to gain an in-depth understanding of very complex glycomes in different biological systems.

Comparative Profiling of N-Glycans Isolated from Serum Samples of Ovarian Cancer Patients and Analyzed by Microchip Electrophoresis

Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related mortalities for women in the United States and the most lethal gynecological cancer. Aberrant glycosylation has been linked to several human diseases, including ovarian cancer, and accurate measurement of changes in glycosylation may provide relevant diagnostic and prognostic information. In this work, we used microchip electrophoresis coupled with laser-induced fluorescence detection to determine quantitative differences among the N-glycan profiles of control individuals and late-stage recurrent ovarian cancer patients prior to and after an experimental drug treatment that combined docetaxel and imatinib mesylate. N-Glycans were enzymatically released from 5-μL aliquots of serum samples, labeled with the anionic fluorescent tag, 8-aminopyrene-1,3,6-trisulfonic acid, and analyzed on microfluidic devices. A 22-cm long separation channel, operated at 1250 V/cm, generated analysis times less than 100 s, separation efficiencies up to 8 × 10(5) plates (3.6 × 10(6) plates/m), and migration time reproducibilities better than 0.1% relative standard deviation after peak alignment. Principal component analysis (PCA) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests showed significant differences between the control and both pre- and post-treatment cancer samples and subtle differences between the pre- and post-treatment cancer samples. Area-under-the-curve (AUC) values from receiver operating characteristics (ROC) tests were used to evaluate the diagnostic merit of N-glycan peaks, and specific N-glycan peaks used in combination provided AUCs > 0.90 (highly accurate test) when the control and pretreatment cancer samples and control and post-treatment samples were compared.

Characterization of protein glycosylation in Francisella tularensis subsp. holarctica; identification of a novel glycosylated lipoprotein required for virulence

FTH_0069 is a previously uncharacterized strongly immunoreactive protein that has been proposed to be a novel virulence factor in Francisella tularensis. Here, the glycan structure modifying two C-terminal peptides of FTH_0069 was identified utilizing high resolution, high mass accuracy mass spectrometry, combined with in-source CID tandem MS experiments. The glycan observed at m/z 1156 was determined to be a hexasaccharide, consisting of two hexoses, three N-acetylhexosamines, and an unknown monosaccharide containing a phosphate group. The monosaccharide sequence of the glycan is tentatively proposed as X-P-HexNAc-HexNAc-Hex-Hex-HexNAc, where X denotes the unknown monosaccharide. The glycan is identical to that of DsbA glycoprotein, as well as to one of the multiple glycan structures modifying the type IV pilin PilA, suggesting a common biosynthetic pathway for the protein modification. Here, we demonstrate that the glycosylation of FTH_0069, DsbA, and PilA was affected in an isogenic mutant with a disrupted wbtDEF gene cluster encoding O-antigen synthesis and in a mutant with a deleted pglA gene encoding pilin oligosaccharyltransferase PglA. Based on our findings, we propose that PglA is involved in both pilin and general F. tularensis protein glycosylation, and we further suggest an inter-relationship between the O-antigen and the glycan synthesis in the early steps in their biosynthetic pathways.