Glycome

A glycome is the entire complement or complete set of all sugars, whether free or chemically bound in more complex molecules, of an organism.

"Glycomics, analogous to genomics and proteomics, is the systematic study of all glycan structures of a given cell type or organism" and is a subset of glycobiology.

[1] "Carbohydrate", "glycan", "saccharide", and "sugar" are generic terms used interchangeably in this context and includes monosaccharides, oligosaccharides, polysaccharides, and derivatives of these compounds.

"Glycans are nature's biologic modifiers," says Jamey Marth, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California San Diego.

[7] A large variety of different labels were introduced in the recent years, where 2-aminobenzamide (AB), anthranilic acid (AA), 2-aminopyridin (PA), 2-aminoacridone (AMAC) and 3-(acetylamino)-6-aminoacridine (AA-Ac) are just a few of them.

Fractionated glycans from high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) instruments can be further analyzed by MALDI-TOF-MS(MS) to get further information about structure and purity.

[10][11][12] Although MRM has been used extensively in metabolomics and proteomics, its high sensitivity and linear response over a wide dynamic range make it especially suited for glycan biomarker research and discovery.

This method uses either naturally occurring lectins or artificial monoclonal antibodies, where both are immobilized on a certain chip and incubated with a fluorescent glycoprotein sample.