Glycomics articles from across Nature Portfolio

The molecular heterogeneity of glycosylated biotherapeutics often complicates analysis by intact mass spectrometry. Here, the authors propose a simplified procedure for characterization that employs proton transfer charge reduction. Integration with glycomic and glycopeptide datasets can further provide glycoform-level information.

This protocol details a method for profiling the glycosylation status of antigen-specific antibodies. The protocol consists of an antibody-capture step using an immunosorbent assay similar to enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, followed by the characterization of captured antibodies using liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry.

Evolution of human H3N2 influenza has limited the specificity of hemagglutinin to a subset of glycan receptors, which brings challenges. By glyco-engineering cell lines, authors show the importance of extended glycan receptors for growth of recent H3N2 viruses and relevance to their production for vaccines.

Accurate identification of intact glycopeptides from mass spectrometry data is essential for the characterization of glycosylation events in biological samples. Here, the authors propose GlycanFinder, a database search and de novo sequencing tool for the analysis of intact glycopeptides.

The Periodic Table of Food Initiative addresses food biomolecular composition information gaps through a standardized, accessible and enabling platform based on analytical tools, data and capacity building. Data from 1,650 foods serve as starting point for demonstrating the capacity of this initiative to contribute to nutrition, health and food systems transformations.

Jumping across silos is a tough sport. But practitioners find joy in leaving comfort zones.

Interactions between carbohydrates and the proteins that bind them (lectins) are often some of the first between a host cell and a viral invader. With its highly glycosylated spike protein, SARS-CoV-2 is no exception. Interrogating glycosylation is vital to understand viral infection, yet it has been a challenge. Improvement in methods ranging from mass spectrometry to glycan arrays and modeling simulations are yielding atomic-level information about the glycans that decorate viruses and host cells alike.

Glycoproteomics is coming of age, thanks to advances in instrumentation, experimental methodologies and computational search algorithms.