Developments and applications of separation and microfluidics methods coupled to electrospray mass spectrometry in glycomics of nervous system gangliosides

Abstract

Gangliosides are particularly abundant in the nervous system (NS) where their pattern and structure in a certain milieu or a defined region exhibit a pronounced specificity. Since gangliosides are useful biomarkers for diagnosis of NS ailments, a clear‐cut mapping of individual components represents a prerequisite for designing ganglioside‐based diagnostic procedures, treatments, or vaccines. These bioclinical aspects and the high diversity of ganglioside species claim for development of specific analytical strategies. This review summarizes the state‐of‐the‐art in the implementation of separation techniques and microfluidics coupled to MS, which have contributed significantly to the advancement of the field. In the first part, the review discusses relevant approaches based on HPLC MS and CE coupled to ESI MS and their applications in the characterization of gangliosides expressed in healthy and diseased NS. A considerable section is dedicated to microfluidics MS and ion mobility separation MS, developed for the study of brain gangliosidome and its changes triggered by various factors, as well as for ganglioside biomarker discovery in neurodegenerative diseases and brain cancer. In the last part of the review, the benefits and perspectives in ganglioside research of these high‐performance techniques are presented.

Human metabolite detection by surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

“…Advances in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and MS have greatly promoted metabolomics analysis. MS and HPLC can be combined for unknown endogenous or exogenous metabolites characterization in complicated biological samples [ [54] , [55] , [56] ]. However, the combination of these technologies requires expensive equipment, complicated sample preparation and long test time [ 57 ].…”

Gangliosides as Biomarkers of Human Brain Diseases: Trends in Discovery and Characterization by High-Performance Mass Spectrometry

“…Thus, the MS screening followed by CID MS/MS required only 500 fmols of material. For these reasons, over the past few years, this bioanalytical strategy demonstrated for the determination of glycosphingolipid markers of brain tumors could be developed into an efficient tool, largely applied to glycomics of human nervous system [ 214 ].…”

FAIMS Shotgun Lipidomics for Enhanced HILIC-like Separation and Automated Annotation of Gangliosides

“…Several devices with different combinations of the applied electric field and separation technique are commercially available 21,22 . Numerous studies using IMS based on temporal-separation have been reported for the analysis of gangliosides, offering separation of isomeric ganglioside species and deep characterization of the ganglioside lipidome 16,17,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] . In contrast, spatialseparation based IMS for gangliosides analysis has received limited attention 35 , despite its potential for increased sensitivity as shown in proteomics and lipidomics studies [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] .…”