Speaker
Description
The immense structural diversity of carbohydrates enables them to convey key-roles in virtually every biological process. However, this structural diversity, at the same moment, poses a formidable challenge for the analysis. The identification of a complex oligosaccharide typically relies on highly sophisticated mass spectrometry-based techniques, chemical derivatization or, most recently, ion mobility-mass spectrometry. Gas-phase infrared (IR) spectroscopic methods, on the other hand, were limited to smaller glycans due to poor spectral resolution that results from their conformational flexibility and thermal activation during photon absorption.
Here, we overcome this limitation by using cold-ion spectroscopy. The optical signatures of complex carbohydrates in superfluid helium nanodroplets proved to contain a wealth of well-resolved absorption features. Even minute structural variations result in remarkable spectral differences providing the basis for an identification of glycans using their spectral fingerprints.
This presentation covers both the framework of this method as well as first results investigating the physical properties of isolated glycans.
