N-glycome Profile Levels Relate to Silent Brain Infarcts in a Cohort of Hypertensives

Immunomodulatory role of glycoRNAs in the brain

Glycosylation of lipids and proteins significantly increases the molecular diversity in the brain. Membrane-localized glycoconjugates facilitate critical neuro-immune interactions. Therefore, glycodysregulation is increasingly recognized as a novel hallmark of various acute and chronic neurological diseases. Although RNAs are heavily modified, they are never thought to be substrates for glycosylation due to their inaccessibility to the glycosylation machinery in the Golgi apparatus. The astonishing discovery of cell surface glycoRNAs opened new avenues for glycomedicine. This review highlighted the key features of GlycoRNAs and further discussed their potential immunomodulatory role in the brain, particularly focusing on post-stroke neuroinflammation.

High-Throughput Glycomic Methods

Glycomics aims to identify the structure and function of the glycome, the complete set of oligosaccharides (glycans), produced in a given cell or organism, as well as to identify genes and other factors that govern glycosylation. This challenging endeavor requires highly robust, sensitive, and potentially automatable analytical technologies for the analysis of hundreds or thousands of glycomes in a timely manner (termed high-throughput glycomics). This review provides a historic overview as well as highlights recent developments and challenges of glycomic profiling by the most prominent high-throughput glycomic approaches, with N-glycosylation analysis as the focal point. It describes the current state-of-the-art regarding levels of characterization and most widely used technologies, selected applications of high-throughput glycomics in deciphering glycosylation process in healthy and disease states, as well as future perspectives.