Application of network smoothing to glycan LC-MS profiling

Joshua Klein, Luis Carvalho, Joseph Zaia

Abstract: Glycosylation is one of the most heterogeneous and complex protein post-translational modifications. Liquid chromatography coupled mass spectrometry (LC-MS) is a common high throughput method for analyzing complex biological samples. Accurate study of glycans require high resolution mass spectrometry. Mass spectrometry data contains intricate sub-structures that encode mass and abundance, requiring several transformations before it can be used to identify biological molecules, requiring automated tools to analyze samples in a high throughput setting. Existing tools for interpreting the resulting data do not take into account related glycans when evaluating individual observations, limiting their sensitivity.