Chapter 4: Cold-ion Spectroscopy of Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates, oligosaccharides, sugars, and glycans are interchangeable terms for a class of omnipresent biomolecules that exist in all sizes and shapes. In sync with their sheer structural diversity, carbohydrates perform a tremendous number of crucial biological tasks. While proteins and RNA are assembled in a template-driven manner, glycan sequences are not directly encoded and strongly depend on dynamic processes. The combination of structural complexity and dynamic assembling processes leads to highly complex structures. Sequencing these molecules represents one of the major challenges of glycosciences. To date, there is no universal tool for the straightforward, fast, and accurate analysis in glycomics. However, the recent developments in cold-ion spectroscopy have advanced the structural analysis of carbohydrates to a new level. This emerging technique provides high-resolution data to identify the sequences of different biologically essential glycans.