A newly developed analytical strategy was applied to profile the total serum N-glycome of 64 colorectal cancer (CRC) patients before and after surgical intervention. In this cohort, it was previously found that serum N-glycome alterations in CRC were associated with patient survival. Here, fluorescent labeling of serum N-glycans was applied using procainamide and followed by sialic acid derivatization specific for α2,6- and α2,3-linkage types via ethyl esterification and amidation, respectively. This strategy allowed efficient separation of specific positional isomers on reversed-phase liquid chromatography-fluorescence detection-mass spectrometry (RPLC-FD-MS) and complemented the previous glycomics data based on matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI)-MS that did not include such separations. The results from comparing pre-operative CRC to post-operative samples were in agreement with studies that identified a decrease in di-antennary structures with core fucosylation and an increase in sialylated tri- and tetra-antennary N-glycans in CRC patient sera. Pre-operative abundances of N-glycans showed good performance for the classification of adenocarcinoma and led to the revisit of the previous MALDI-MS dataset with regard to histological and clinical data. This strategy has the potential to monitor patient profiles before, during, and after clinical events such as treatment, therapy, or surgery and should also be further explored.
Keywords: N-glycosylation; colorectal cancer; mass spectrometry; reversed-phase liquid chromatography; serum; sialic acid derivatization; surgery.