Recombinant human erythropoietin (EPO) is a biopharmaceutical frequently used in the treatment of anemia. It is a heavily glycosylated protein with a diverse and complex glycome. EPO -glycosylation influences important pharmacological parameters, prominently serum half-life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Macintosh blade direct laryngoscopy is widely used for endotracheal intubation. It may, however, provide an incomplete view of the glottis in patients with challenging airway anatomy. Consequently, various video laryngoscopes have been developed to enhance the visualization of the glottis and facilitate intubation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCardiovascular disease (CVD) is a group of health conditions affecting the heart and vascular system with very high prevalence and mortality rates. The presence of CVD is characterised by high levels of inflammation which have previously been associated with increased plasma concentrations of N-acetyl neuraminic acid (Neu5Ac). While Neu5Ac has been studied in the context of CVD, Neu5,9Ac has not, despite being the second most abundant sialic acid in human plasma.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomarkers to guide clinical decision making at diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease [IBD] are urgently needed. We investigated a composite serum N-glycomic biomarker to predict future disease course in a discovery cohort of 244 newly diagnosed IBD patients. In all, 47 individual glycan peaks were analysed using ultra-high performance liquid chromatography, identifying 105 glycoforms from which 24 derived glycan traits were calculated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe eukaryotic proteome undergoes constant surveillance by quality control systems that either sequester, refold, or eliminate aberrant proteins by ubiquitin-dependent mechanisms. Ubiquitin-conjugation necessitates the recognition of degradation determinants, termed degrons, by their cognate E3 ubiquitin-protein ligases. To learn about the distinctive properties of quality control degrons, we performed an unbiased peptidome stability screen in yeast.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEfficient characterization of IgE antibodies and their glycan structures is required for understanding their function in allergy and in the emerging AllergoOncology field for antibody immunotherapy. We report the generation, glyco-profiling and functional analysis of native and sialic acid-deficient glyco-engineered human IgE. The antibodies produced from human embryonic kidney cells were purified via a human IgE class-specific affinity matrix and structural integrity was confirmed by SDS-PAGE and size-exclusion chromatography (SEC).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRepetitive stress injuries to the rotator cuff, and particularly the supraspinatus tendon (SST), are highly prevalent and debilitating. These injuries typically occur through the application of cyclic load below the threshold necessary to cause acute tears, leading to accumulation of incremental damage that exceeds the body's ability to heal, resulting in decreased mechanical strength and increased risk of frank rupture at lower loads. Consistent progression of fatigue damage across multiple model systems suggests a generalized tendon response to overuse.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOveruse injuries of the rotator cuff, particularly of the supraspinatus tendon (SST), are highly prevalent and debilitating in work, sport, and daily activities. Despite the clinical significance of these injuries, there remains a large degree of uncertainty regarding the pathophysiology of injury, optimal methods of nonoperative and operative repair, and how to adequately assess tendon injury and healing. The tendon response to fatigue damage resulting from overuse is different from that of acute rupture and results in either an adaptive (healing) or a maladaptive (degenerative) response.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSialic acids have diverse biological roles, ranging from promoting up to preventing protein and cellular recognition in health and disease. The various functions of these monosaccharides are owed, in part, to linkage variants, and as a result, linkage-specific analysis of sialic acids is an important aspect of glycomic studies. This has been addressed by derivatization strategies using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MS) or sialidase digestion arrays followed by liquid chromatography (LC)-MS.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolyploidy, the expression of more than two sets of chromosomes, is common in plants, and is thought to influence plant trait expression and drive plant species evolution. The degree to which polyploidy influences interactions among physiological processes such as growth and defense in natural populations through its effect on phenotypic variability is poorly understood. We link broad plant genotypic features (including polyploidy) to phenotypic expression of growth and chemical defense in natural populations of quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) to examine patterns in resource allocation that might drive growth-defense tradeoffs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe representation of an animal's position in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) is distributed across several modules of grid cells, each characterized by a distinct spatial scale. The population activity within each module is tightly coordinated and preserved across environments and behavioral states. Little is known, however, about the coordination of activity patterns across modules.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomolecular corona formation has emerged as a recurring and important phenomenon in nanomedicine that has been investigated for potential applications in disease diagnosis. In this study, we have combined the "personalized protein corona" with the N-glycosylation profiling that has recently gained considerable interest in human plasma biomarker discovery as a powerful early warning diagnostic and patient stratification tool. We envisioned that the protein corona formation could be exploited as an enrichment step that is critically important in both proteomic and proteoglycomic workflows.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNine- and twelve-membered triaza-macrocycles were appended to one end of homospermidine to make polyamine lassos. These compounds were shown to be potent polyamine transport inhibitors (PTIs) using pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma L3.6pl cells, which have high polyamine transport activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHypothesis: Following blood administration, the pristine surface of nanoparticles (NPs) associates with biomolecules from the surrounding environment forming the so-called "biomolecular corona". It is well accepted that the biomolecular corona dramatically affects the NP fate in the biological medium while the pristine surface is no longer available for binding. Recent studies have shown that the glycans associated with the proteins forming the corona have a role in the NP interaction with macrophages, but the glycan identities remain unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe medial entorhinal cortex is part of a neural system for mapping the position of an individual within a physical environment. Grid cells, a key component of this system, fire in a characteristic hexagonal pattern of locations, and are organized in modules that collectively form a population code for the animal's allocentric position. The invariance of the correlation structure of this population code across environments and behavioural states, independent of specific sensory inputs, has pointed to intrinsic, recurrently connected continuous attractor networks (CANs) as a possible substrate of the grid pattern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaturity-onset diabetes of the young due to hepatocyte nuclear factor-1 alpha variants (HNF1A-MODY) causes monogenic diabetes. Individuals carrying damaging variants in HNF1A show decreased levels of α1-3,4 fucosylation, as demonstrated on antennary fucosylation of blood plasma N-glycans. The excellent diagnostic performance of this glycan biomarker in blood plasma N-glycans of individuals with HNF1A-MODY has been demonstrated using liquid chromatography methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFN-Acetylneuraminic acid (sialic acid, Neu5Ac) is one of a large, diverse family of nine-carbon monosaccharides that play roles in many biological functions such as immune response. Neu5Ac has previously been identified as a potential biomarker for the presence and pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes and cancer. More recent research has highlighted acetylated sialic acid derivatives, specifically Neu5,9Ac , as biomarkers for oral and breast cancers, but advances in analysis have been hampered due to a lack of commercially available quantitative standards.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMonoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are one of the cornerstones of modern medicine, across an increasing range of therapeutic areas. All therapeutic mAbs are glycoproteins, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCellular homeostasis depends on robust protein quality control (PQC) pathways that discern misfolded proteins from functional ones in the cell. One major branch of PQC involves the controlled degradation of misfolded proteins by the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Here ubiquitin ligases must recognize and bind to misfolded proteins with sufficient energy to form a complex and with an adequate half-life to achieve poly-ubiquitin chain formation, the signal for protein degradation, prior to its dissociation from the ligase.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe development of reliable, affordable, high-resolution glycomics technologies that can be used for many samples in a high-throughput manner are essential for both the optimization of glycosylation in the biopharmaceutical industry as well as for the advancement of clinical diagnostics based on glycosylation biomarkers. We will use this chapter to review the sample preparation processes that have been used on liquid-handling robots to obtain high-quality glycomics data for both biopharmaceutical and clinical antibody samples. This will focus on glycoprotein purification, followed by glycan or glycopeptide generation, derivatization and enrichment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman blood plasma and serum have been a source of biomarkers for the indication and progression of many diseases for a few decades now. Human blood plasma is also an excellent source material to enable patients to monitor their health, with a multitude of biomarkers detectable for the assessment of health status. Blood sampling kits are increasingly available for use in the home with no specialist clinical skills required to obtain good quality samples for pathology lab analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF