Coupling capillary electrophoresis with ion mobility mass spectrometry for the characterization of intact glycoproteins isomers – MIOSEC

Glycosylation is a post-translational modification regulated by enzymes, which activity and expression level are affected by physiological and pathological conditions. Therefore, the study of their structure, the primary sequence of the protein associated to the sugar chain composition is an important challenge to achieve.
The MIOSEC project proposed here aims to develop a new analytical method to identify and characterize glycoproteins and glycopeptides in a simple way. The project describes a newly type of coupling between capillary electrophoresis (CE) and ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) hyphenated with mass spectrometry (MS) for the glycoprotein and glycopeptides analysis. Although the concept of this coupling is pretty recent, the association developed here is particularly innovative as it does not exist yet on commercial instruments, and will allow the structural analysis in a single run. This coupling will be instrumentally established (WP0) prior optimization for glycopeptides mixture from venoms such as Conus striatus (WP1). Intact glycoproteins will also be studied using this CE-IMS-MS coupling in order to give a profile of the various conformations of monoclonal and therapeutic antibodies (WP2). Finally, a part of the project will be focus on the creation of a database with the different parameters obtained from the methods, such as electrophoretic mobility, mass-to-charge ratio, drift time, during these analyses to help in identification of these glycopeptides and glycoproteins (WP3).
The project will be held by the appropriate project leader with the expertise level required combined with an adequate laboratory and environment, all specialized in separation and mass spectrometry of biomolecules.