ABSTRACT
Carbohydrates were the rst biopolymer to be identied, by Lavoisier in 1750, and long before any knowledge of genes or proteins; in 1902, the second Nobel Prize to be awarded for Chemistry was won by Emil Fischer for his study of the basic components of carbohydrates. Now a century later, with sequence strategies for both a genome and proteome in place, a comprehensive approach for sequencing carbohydrate structures is taking shape slowly. Such components have provided the analytical challenge of the century; replete with stereo and structural isomers, a multiplicity of linkage positions, and all embedded in the intricacies of branching. This chapter outlines and summarizes progress made recently due mainly to our ability to ionize large polar molecules, thanks to the researches of John Fenn and Koichi Tanaka, who were awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and our understanding of the modes of operation of ion traps (ITs) developed by Wolfgang Paul, Norman Ramsey, and Hans Dehmelt, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989. During the past two decades, with facile ionization, multiple steps of disassembly (that is multiple stages of mass selection, isolation, and dissociation, usually induced by collisions, or tandem mass spectrometry (MSn)), and a series of software tools, an instrumental strategy is now evolving that can be identied clearly as a sequenator for the glycoproteome.
