Discovery of the chemical function of glycosidases: design, synthesis, and evaluation of mass-differentiated carbohydrate libraries.

[reaction: see text] Discovery of the catalytic chemical function of the many putative glycosidases coded in genomes currently relies on individual testing of possible substrates, usually as their p-nitrophenol conjugate. Herein, we present an alternative chemical proteomics approach using a synthetic mass-differentiated heat-stable substrate library with mass spectrometry readout. Library components do not serve as reaction inhibitors and both primary and secondary enzyme substrates can be delineated.