Comprehensive Study of O-linked Glycopeptides of Erythropoeitin

Protein glycosylation can effectively be analyzed on the glycopeptide level where site-specific modifications remain preserved. This application note introduces a new method allowing for automatic identification of unknown glycopeptides in one step without prior release of the glycans. MALDI-TOF/TOF technology combined with an integrated software solution is used to analyze and compare O-linked glycosylation of two erythropoietin samples of different origin. MALDI-specific fragmentation patterns are used to successfully find the glycopeptide spectra in a complete LC-MALDI dataset and identify glycan and peptide moieties.