Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Sweet new method for N-glyco peptide enrichment!


In press at MCP (currently, though not permanently, open access!) is this cool new paper from Ronghu Wu's lab at Georgia Tech.

In this study, the Wu lab ditches conventional enrichment techniques for a new 2-stage chemical approach:  the glycos are reacted with boronic acid.  The reaction is strong and reversible and the boronic derived glycos are easily enriched.   Treating the enriched samples with PGNase F leaves samples that are easily analyzed by mass spec!

The end result? 816 N-glycosylation sites in yeast and 675 that were localized with greater than 99% confidences!

This is why we will always need chemists doing mass spec, regardless of how successful we are as biologists, sometimes we need chemists to go back and reinvent the techniques that have become so standard to us.


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