Boosting Quantification of N-Glycans by an Enhanced Isobaric Multiplex Reagents for Carbonyl-Containing Compound (SUGAR) Tagging Strategy

Abstract

Glycans are complex molecules composed of various monosaccharides and exhibit diverse, branched polymer structures. Extensive research has been conducted on mass spectrometry (MS)-based qualitative and quantitative glycan analysis due to their critical biological functions. However, traditional data-dependent acquisition (DDA) in MS analysis primarily selects a limited subset of abundant ions during MS1 scans for fragmentation in subsequent MS2 stages. In this study, we introduce an advanced isobaric labeling strategy that incorporates a large amount of content-relevant sample labeled with one isobaric tag channel as an additional boosting channel. This innovation enhances the efficiency of isobaric multiplex reagents for carbonyl-containing compound (SUGAR) tagging in quantitative glycomics. Notably, this approach significantly improves the characterization of low-abundance N-glycans and enables the detection of subtle quantitative differences in N-glycan profiling.