Highly sensitive glycosylamine labelling of O-glycans using non-reductive β-elimination

When developing biopharmaceuticals, glycans are the most important posttranslational protein modifications that must be addressed because they affect the between-protein interactions that maintain homeostasis. The glycan profile may be defined as a critical quality attribute of a biopharmaceutical. Comprehensive analysis of protein glycosylation must overcome challenges such as the release, labelling, separation and detection of O-glycans. In contrast, N-glycans can be readily released non-reductively from peptide backbones using an enzyme such as peptide N-glycosidase F. We developed a highly sensitive protocol using RapiFluor-MS to label glycosylamines for O-glycan analysis combined with a non-enzyme treatment for efficient release of the reduced O-glycans from the glycoproteins. Here we used the cytotoxic T lymphocyte associated protein 4-immunoglobulin G (Ig) fusion protein and fetuin as models for O-glycan analysis and compared the analytical methods glycopeptide mapping, 2-AB labelling and RapiFluor-MS labelling. The structures of major O-glycans and low-abundance O-glycans were successfully identified using the third technique, which detected the O-glycans with high sensitivity.