Chemical strategies to glycoprotein analysis

This chapter focuses on glycoproteomics, the comprehensive study of glycosylated proteins throughout the proteome. It highlights major trends in two major aspects of the glycoproteomics field: sample preparation and mass spectrometry (MS) analysis. The sample prep will be divided into methods to modify glycopeptides and methods to enrich glycopeptides, while analysis will be divided between MS analysis and data processing. Because of their complexity, efficient extraction, protection, identification, and quantitation of glycoproteins and glycopeptides often require substantial enzymatic or chemical modification in the steps leading up to MS analysis. Generation of new bioinformatics methodologies for processing glycoproteomics data is currently a quickly advancing field - in additional to commercial software tools, over half a dozen new algorithms and toolsets were published in 2015 and 2016. The advent and adoption of higher energy collisional dissociation was a major development that helped bring about the current revolution of intact glycopeptide-oriented glycoproteomics.