Glycans, as essential biological macromolecules widely present in proteins, lipids, and cells, play crucial roles in numerous biological processes, including cell recognition, signal transduction, immune response, and disease progression. The study of glycomics, which focuses on the structure, function, and expression of glycans, has become a key research direction in biotechnology, pharmaceutical science, and clinical medicine. However, glycan analysis faces significant challenges due to their low abundance, high structural diversity, and the interference of complex matrices in biological samples. Traditional glycan enrichment methods, such as lectin affinity chromatography, solid-phase extraction, and precipitation, often suffer from low enrichment efficiency, poor specificity, cumbersome operation, and difficulty in scaling up, which severely limit the in-depth study of glycomics. Our service enables rapid, efficient, and high-specificity enrichment of glycans from various biological samples, delivering high-purity glycan fractions for subsequent analysis, thereby accelerating glycomics research and supporting the development of related industries.
Introductions
Glycosylation is a ubiquitous and structurally diverse post-translational modification that generates a vast array of glycoforms from a single polypeptide backbone. Traditional methods for glycan sample preparation, such as solid-phase extraction (SPE) cartridges or porous graphitized carbon (PGC) tips, often involve multiple centrifugation and vacuum drying steps that are time-consuming, prone to sample loss, and difficult to automate for large-scale studies. Our service employs a magnetic bead-based separation strategy to revolutionize this process. The magnetic bead platform enables rapid, efficient, and highly reproducible purification of glycans through a simple "bind-wash-elute" protocol that is perfectly suited for automation. This introduction to streamlined glycomics allows researchers to achieve deep, comprehensive, and quantitative glycan profiles with unprecedented ease and reliability, turning glycan analysis from a bottleneck into a robust and scalable pipeline.
Technology Overview
Our service is built upon a versatile magnetic bead platform designed specifically for glycan cleanup and enrichment. The core process involves using functionalized superparamagnetic beads that interact selectively with the hydrophilic or chemically tagged glycans, separating them from salts, detergents, peptides, and other contaminants present in the release mixture. We primarily utilize two complementary, high-performance chemistries: Phenylboronic Acid (PBA) Chemistry and Hydrophilic Interaction Liquid Chromatography (HILIC) Functionalized Beads.
- Phenylboronic Acid (PBA) Chemistry: This method exploits the affinity of boronic acid for cis-diol groups, which are ubiquitous in glycans. Under slightly alkaline conditions, boronic acid forms reversible, cyclic esters with the diols on the glycan structures. When immobilized on magnetic beads, PBA acts as a highly effective capture ligand. Following binding and stringent washing to remove non-diol-containing impurities, the enriched glycans are gently eluted under acidic conditions, which breaks the boronate ester bonds. This method is robust, selective, and excellent for cleaning up glycans from complex release reactions containing enzymes and chemical reagents.
- HILIC Functionalized Magnetic Beads: HILIC-based enrichment capitalizes on the inherent hydrophilicity of glycans. Our beads are coated with hydrophilic functional groups (e.g., amide, zwitterionic, or diol surfaces). In a high-percentage organic solvent environment (typically acetonitrile), glycans preferentially partition into the hydrophilic bead layer and are retained, while more hydrophobic contaminants (like peptides and lipids) remain in the solvent. After washing with organic-rich buffer, the glycans are eluted with an aqueous solution. This technique is exceptionally effective for desalting and providing a clean glycan fraction with high recovery, making it ideal for direct MS analysis.
Our Services
We deliver comprehensive, flexible glycan enrichment solutions customized to your specific analytical goals and sample types.
- Complete Glycan Sample Preparation: Full-service processing starting from your materials—purified glycoproteins, monoclonal antibodies, serum/plasma, cell lysates, or tissue homogenates. We handle release, enrichment, desalting, and optional labeling.
- N-Glycan & O-Glycan Specific Enrichment: Specialized workflows for the selective analysis of N-linked glycans (via PNGase F release) or O-linked glycans (via chemical or enzymatic release).
- Chemistry Selection Guidance: Expert consultation to choose between PBA (for high-specificity diol-based cleanup) and HILIC (for superior desalting and hydrophilic enrichment) strategies.
- Glycan Derivatization & Labeling: Optional on-bead or post-elution derivatization services, including permethylation for enhanced MS sensitivity and stability, or fluorescent tagging (2-AB, procainamide) for HPLC-based profiling with fluorescence detection.
- High-Throughput & Automated Glycomics: For large-scale studies (e.g., clinical cohorts or bioprocess monitoring), we employ automated liquid handling workstations integrated with magnetic bead separators, ensuring unparalleled consistency, speed, and capacity.
- Sub-Fractionation Services: Sequential enrichment or fractionation based on glycan properties, such as separating sialylated from non-sialylated glycans using tailored chemistries.
Applications
These foundational strengths underpin all our magnetic bead-based separation services, guaranteeing reliability, precision, and superior outcomes for every client project, including glycan enrichment.
- Superior Magnetic Bead Performance: We utilize meticulously engineered superparamagnetic beads characterized by uniform size distribution, strong magnetic responsiveness, and exceptionally low non-specific binding. This ensures rapid and complete magnetic separation (within seconds), minimal carryover during washing, and near-quantitative bead recovery, leading to outstanding reproducibility and data integrity across all applications, from minute clinical samples to large-scale preparative workflows.
- Proprietary Surface Chemistry & Custom Functionalization: Our core expertise extends beyond standard bead use to the precise design and customization of bead surfaces. We offer a comprehensive portfolio of optimized chemistries and possess the capability to develop custom ligand conjugations to meet unique research needs. This ensures optimal ligand density, orientation, and stability, resulting in maximum binding capacity, target specificity, and batch-to-batch consistency for every service we provide.
Our Process
Our approach is highly collaborative, ensuring the final product meets your exact specifications:
Synthesis and functionalization
Characterization and validation
Quality assurance and delivery
Our Advantages
In depth technical mastery of surface chemistry
Our core expertise lies not only in conjugation, but also in mastering the complex interface science between bead surfaces and biomolecules. We understand how surface charge, hydrophilicity, spacer arm length, and activation chemistry affect ligand orientation, stability, and final analytical performance.
Unmatched Focus on Functional Performance
Many services measure success by the amount of ligand attached. Our primary metric is the functional activity of the final product. We design validation tests that mimic your end-use application to ensure the conjugated beads deliver high capture efficiency, specificity, and sensitivity.
Proven Success with Challenging & Novel Ligands
We have extensive experience conjugating not just standard IgG antibodies, but also difficult molecules such as fragmented antibodies, small peptides, unstable enzymes, oligonucleotides, and novel proprietary proteins. We develop customized protocols to handle sensitive ligands.
The Magnetic Bead-Based Glycan Enrichment Service we provide is a professional, efficient, and reliable solution for glycan enrichment, which effectively solves the problems of low abundance, high complexity, and strong matrix interference in glycan analysis. By combining advanced magnetic bead modification technology with specific glycan recognition ligands, our service achieves rapid, high-specificity, and high-purity enrichment of glycans from various biological samples, providing strong support for glycomics research, pharmaceutical development, clinical diagnosis, and other related fields. Our service features strong technical strength, strict quality control, flexible customization, and perfect after-sales support, which can meet the diverse needs of different customers. We are committed to providing high-quality magnetic bead-based glycan enrichment services, helping our customers accelerate research progress, improve experimental efficiency, and achieve technological breakthroughs.
