A method for the determination of the chemical structure of glycolipids biosynthesized in vitro and the specificity and activity of glycosyltransferases.

A very sensitive method for the qualitative and quantitative investigation of the biosynthesis of the oligosaccharide chains of glycolipids in such tissues as cultured cells, biopsies, or cell organelles, is described. It permits the determination, on an ultramicro-scale, of the specificity of glycosyltransferases in terms of the exact chemical structure of the products that are synthesized from known labeled glycolipid precursors, and defines without ambiguity the precursor-to-product relationship in biosynthetic incubations in vitro.