Progresses in mass spectrometry-based plant N-glycomics and N-glycoproteomics

Abstract

N-glycosylation is a common post-translational modification (PTM) in plants that possesses important biological functions including protein folding, protein quality control, protein stability and protein-protein interactions. Nowadays, the interest in analysis of glycoproteins using mass spectrometry is increasing because of advances in instrumentation and automatic data analysis tools. Here, we describe the progresses in mass spectrometry-based N-glycomics and N-glycoproteomics in plants. We also provide a comprehensive summary of N-glycan structures in plants according to the biosynthetic rules and up-to-date reports, which serves as a theoretical database for all N-glycan-related search engines.