Platform technology to identify potential disease markers and establish heritability and environmental determinants of the human serum N-glycome

Glycomics has been proven to be challenging when compared to genomics, transcriptomics, or proteomics. Understanding glycans is difficult as they have a non-template driven biosynthesis and their structural characterization requires highly efficient techniques. This review will describe the robotic platform developed in our laboratory for high-throughput analysis of N-glycans, and some of the advances obtained in the Glyco-biomarker field obtained in the last three years, including the first Genome-Wide Association Study showing a direct link between DNA polymorphisms and glycosylation. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.