An easy high-performance liquid chromatography quantification of monosaccharides from heal mucosal tissue glycoproteins in pigs

Abstract

THE carbohydrate units of glycoproteins modulate significantly the physicochemical and biological properties of the parent proteins. 1 Since the glycosylation machinery 2 depends on the type, as well as on the physiological state, of the organism, tissue, or cell in which the glycoprotein is made, it is now well clearly understood that many pathologic states are characterized by changes in the carbohydrate structure of cellular glycoproteins. Glycosylation changes are therefore becoming widely used as markers for many pathologic situations, including inflammation and cancer. Our interest is focused on small bowel transplantation in pigs in which, despite good control of rejection, the bowel does not seem to work well and a lot of complications prevent good function and long survival. So, the study of the mucosal carbohydrate moieties should help to understand the difficulties associated with an intestinal transplantation. In general, the analysis of the monosaccharide composition of oligosaccharides is performed by several techniques such as gas chromatography (GC), gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GC-MS), 3,4 and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). 5 However, there is still a growing demand for easy and sensitive methods of analysis and quantification of samples of biological origin, as the improved sensitive methods recently described in the literature generally concern the compositional analysis of monosaccharides derived from glycoproteins of commercial origin. Here we describe an easy approach to the quantification of the neutral monosaccharides originated from the ileal mucosal glycoprotein content through high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).