Automated N-Glycosylation Sequencing Of Biopharmaceuticals By Capillary Electrophoresis

Comprehensive analysis of the N-linked carbohydrates of glycoproteins is gaining high recent interest in both the biopharmaceutical and biomedical fields. In addition to high resolution glycosylation profiling, sugar residue and linkage specific enzymes are also routinely used for exoglycosidase digestion based carbohydrate sequencing. This latter one, albeit introduced decades ago, still mostly practiced by following tedious and time consuming manual processes. In this paper we introduce an automated carbohydrate sequencing approach using the appropriate exoglycosidase enzymes in conjunction with the utilization of some of the features of a capillary electrophoresis (CE) instrument to speed up the process. The enzymatic reactions were accomplished within the temperature controlled sample storage compartment of a capillary electrophoresis unit and the separation capillary was also utilized for accurate delivery of the exoglycosidase enzymes. CE analysis was conducted after each digestion step obtaining in this way the sequence information of N-glycans in 60 and 128 minutes using the semi- and the fully-automated methods, respectively.