Glycomic work-flow for analysis of mucin O-linked oligosaccharides.

The high-throughput analysis of the glycosylation of high molecular weight proteins, such as mucins, has been the aim of glycomics initiatives for the last decade. Here, we present a work-flow for the efficient and reproducible analysis of reduced oligosaccharides from a typical mucin sample. This work-flow can be applied to any similar samples of oligosaccharides. We include recently developed bioinformatic procedures for the statistical analysis of sample sets. These procedures can be applied in any laboratory environment, using free programs that are platform independent. The scripts are explained and can be adjusted to suit the individual experiment. Finally, a number of example results are given to highlight the use of the statistical analysis in a biological context.