A precise and versatile platform for rapid glycosylation analysis of brain tissue

Glycans influence a variety of aspects of tissue development and pathophysiology, harboring a wealth of biochemical information exploitable for the discovery of new biomarkers. The development of versatile and precise glycoanalytical platforms is crucial to bring to the scientific community reliable tools to unveil the glycan-encoded biochemical information. In this work, a novel platform for brain glycan analysis, named Lysate in-Solution Deglycosylation (LSD), is presented, validated and compared to similar methodologies reported in the literature. Briefly, within the LSD workflow, brain tissue is lysed, proteins are purified via methanol/chloroform extraction, and directly deglycosylated with PNGase F. Released N-glycans are purified using a second round of methanol/chloroform extraction, labelled with fluorescent tags, and cleaned-up prior to LC-FLR/MS analysis. LSD is a quick, sensitive, robust, precise, specific and versatile glycomic workflow, compatible with multiple glyco(proteo)mics analyses of the same sample and eventually applicable to other solid tissues. LSD was devised as a plug-and-play platform for quick glycosylation analysis, and was designed to be compatible with a variety of analytical set-ups (i.e., diverse detection systems), thus enabling the extraction of an additional layer of information from different studies (i.e., proteomics) without the need to collect fresh biological materials. In comparison to analogous N-glycomic workflows, LSD performs reliably on the smallest amount of starting brain tissue and, to the best of the authors' knowledge, is currently the most thoroughly validated neuro-N-glycomic method in the field-related literature, thus representing a significant step forward on the road towards glycan-based biomedical applications.