Get all of your glycoprotein biomarkers in a single enrichment

Yes, I know my focus has been on glycos recently.  Its cause thats where this whole field (particularly the cancer people) seems to be going!  

Check out this quote from Esther Sok Hwee Cheow et. al., in this new paper in press at MCP:  "The most clinically useful protein biomarkers in cancer medicine are glycosylated molecules..."

In plasma you have soluble glycoproteins and insoluble ones that get stuck in lipid vesicles.  Since there seemed to be only methods available to get one or the other, this group came up with an entirely new method that pulls down both families of glycoproteins all at once.  

The LC-MS analysis was performed after de-glycosylating everything with PNGase.  It seems like the glyco field goes 2 ways on this topic (to deglycosylate or not to deglycosylate and run with ETD).  Since the LC-MS analysis was performed on an LTQ FT Ultra they had to go with the former.  I tend to have some reservations with this technique, but if you are doing your MS1 at 100,000 resolution (which they did)...I'm going to be okay with it.

All in all, a cool new technique that gets us closer to all the awesome biomarkers we know are in that plasma somewhere!