Automated annotation and quantification of glycans using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Abstract

As a common post-translational modification, protein glycosylation plays an important role in many biological processes, and it is known to be associated with human diseases. Mass spectrometry (MS)-based glycomic profiling techniques have been developed to measure the abundances of glycans in complex biological samples and applied to the discovery of putative glycan biomarkers. To automate the annotation of glycomic profiles in the liquid chromatography-MS (LC-MS) data, we present here a user-friendly software tool, MultiGlycan, implemented in C# on Windows systems. We tested MultiGlycan by using several glycomic profiling datasets acquired using LC-MS under different preparations and show that MultiGlycan executes fast and generates robust and reliable results. MultiGlycan can be freely downloaded at http://darwin.informatics.indiana.edu/MultiGlycan/. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.