Metabolic oligosaccharide engineering of Plasmodium falciparum intraerythrocytic stages allows direct glycolipid analysis by mass spectrometry

TAMARA PINERO, ; VALNICE J. PERES; ALEJANDRO KATZIN; ALICIA S. COUTO

MOLECULAR AND BIOCHEMICAL PARASITOLOGY

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2012 vol. 182 p. 88 - 92

0166-6851

A recent addition to the arsenal of tools for glycome analysis is the use of metabolic labels that allowcovalent tagging of glycans with imaging probes. In this work we show that N-azidoglucosamine wassuccessfully incorporated into glycolipidic structures of Plasmodium falciparum intraerythrocytic stages.The ability to tag glycoconjugates selectively with a fluorescent reporter group permits TLC detection ofthe glycolipids providing a new method to quantify dynamic changes in the glycosylation pattern andfacilitating direct mass spectrometry analyses. Presence of glycosylphosphatidylinositol and glycosphingolipidstructures was determined in the different extracts. Furthermore, the fluorescent tag was usedas internal matrix for the MALDI experiment making even easier the analysis.