ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between the fi eld of glycomics and cancer research and the benefi ts, progress, and obstacles in the analysis of glycans using nanoLC, nanospray MS toward the diagnosis, progression, and treatment of cancer. Numerous researchers have begun to make a comparative study of protein glycosylation patterns in healthy and cancerous patients, but the profi ling of glycans in biological systems such as tissues or plasma has proven diffi cult. To date, there is no single methodology that has been developed and used as a paradigm for glycan analysis. This makes the fi eld of glycomics extremely diffi cult when comparing data from one research lab to another, and without validation and reproduction of results by several laboratories, the forward progress of the fi eld is signifi cantly encumbered. Additionally, glycans are signifi cantly more complex than nucleic acids and proteins, which now have well-known methodologies for the profi ling of the genome and proteome, respectively. The complexity of glycans is due to different types of linkages (α and β) and the multiple branching possibilities at each monosaccharide unit, both of which are not trivial to discern and often involve laborious analyses for each individual glycan.
