Protein glycosylation is a complex post-translational modification (PTM) that provides great proteomic diversity. It involves the attachment of sugars at specific amino acid residues. Asn (N-linked) or Ser/Thr (O-linked) being the residues most frequently glycosylated. Glycosylation is critical for physiological and pathological cellular functions and affects the bioavailability, efficacy, stability, and solubility of therapeutic glycoproteins. Therefore, obtaining information about the type, position, and composition of glycans within a protein sequence is paramount. The structural diversity and heterogeneity of the glycoproteins present a significant analytical challenge. Glycan microarrays technology is often adopted for glycosylation studies as it enables high-throughput screening of glycan-mediated interactions.
A recently published review, offer a comprehensive overview of the methodology, including information about:
- Selection of microarray substrate
- Printing conditions
- Assay development
- Data acquisition and processing.
It also lists tools useful for glycan microarray analysis:
Repositories of glycan microarray data
College microarray data online portal
CarbArrayART (available for testing upon request)
Data visualization/manual data analysis
GLAD: GLycan Array Dashboard for visualization of microarray data
Automated analysis
MotifFinder: to mine glycan array data using predefined motif lists
SignalFinder-Microarray: an image analysis tool
MCAW-DB utilizes Multiple Carbohydrate Alignment with Weights (MCAW) algorithm to align glycan structures
CCARL enables identification of terminal residues
Structural information
GlyMDB: links glycan microarray binding data from the CFG database to protein structures (PDB)
Gly-Spec (Grafting) uses structural data to predict glycan microarray binding
Grace Microarray products for Glycan analysis:
PATH® Protein Microarray Slides
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