News & Events

When

Date - October 5, 2016
1:00 pm

What

Ph.D. Literature Seminar—751

Title: “Travelling Wave Ion Mobility – Mass Spectrometry in the Era of Biomedical Glycomics”

Abstract:

Glycans, or carbohydrates bound to other biomolecules such as proteins and lipids are ubiquitous in the biological system. Aberrant expression of glycans has been associated to a variety of pathological conditions. Detection, identification and manipulation of these biomolecules pose a great promise in the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of diseases in clinical medicine. However, glycans are structurally complex, often existing as a mixture of regioisomers and stereoisomers that have individually distinct biochemical functions. Existing analytical tools such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (MS), are typically used to elucidate the structure of glycans. In particular, MS has become the preferred method to analyze low abundance glycans in biomedical samples. Using this platform alone, isomeric molecular species cannot be distinguished, even with upfront chromatographic step in most cases. Travelling wave ion mobility, a gas-phase separation technique based on size, charge and shape of an ion is a very promising technique for isomeric separations. This tool has been successfully demonstrated as an orthogonal approach in the analysis of different isomeric compounds in metabolomics, lipidomics, and proteomics studies. In this talk, the use of integrated travelling wave ion mobility and MS for the detection, resolution and identification of isomeric glycan molecular species will be discussed.