Omics‐based Identification of Glycan Structures as Biomarkers for a Variety of Diseases

Abstract

Glycans play important roles in cell communication, protein interaction, and immunity, and structural changes in glycans are associated with the regulation of a range of biological pathways involved in disease. However, our understanding of the detailed relationships between specific diseases and glycans is very limited. In this study, we proposed an omics-based method to investigate the correlations between glycans and a wide range of human diseases. We analyzed the gene expression patterns of glycogenes (glycosyltransferases and glycosidases) for 79 different diseases. A biological pathway-based glycogene signature was constructed to identify the alteration in glycan biosynthesis and the associated glycan structures for each disease state. The degradation of N-glycan and keratan sulfate, for example, may promote the growth or metastasis of multiple types of cancer, including endometrial, gastric, and nasopharyngeal. Our results also revealed that commonalities between diseases can be interpreted using glycogene expression patterns, as well as the associated glycan structure patterns at the level of the affected pathway. The proposed method is expected to be useful for understanding the relationships between glycans, glycogenes, and disease and identifying disease-specific glycan biomarkers.

MYC-driven synthesis of Siglec ligands is a glycoimmune checkpoint

“…Tumor-associated glycan signatures are products of biosynthetic machineries that are presumably altered in cancer. Changes in glycogene expression are widely observed in cancer ( 16 , 17 ), but a cohesive picture that relates these transcriptomic changes to altered glycosylation of functional relevance is lacking. Furthermore, the mechanisms driving altered glycogene expression have not been addressed.…”

Bacillus subtilis HW2 enhances growth performance and alleviates gut injury via attenuation of endoplasmic reticulum stress and regulation of gut microbiota in broilers under necrotic enteritis challenge

“…Moreover, the pathways of mannose type O-glycan biosynthesis and other types of O-glycan biosynthesis were decreased in H-Pro group on day 42. Report indicated that changes in O-glycans biosynthesis were found in many diseases, like intestinal bowel disease and malignant melanoma ( Akiyoshi et al, 2020 ). Therefore, decreased the pathway related to O-glycan biosynthesis also implied the beneficial roles of B. subtilis HW2.…”

Determination of monosaccharide composition in human serum by an improved HPLC method and its application as candidate biomarkers for endometrial cancer

“…In addition, different N-glycan structures in serum IgGs that have no direct relationships with cancer cells can be useful distinguish healthy individuals from patients with lung, gastric, prostate, ovarian, and breast cancers ( 27 – 31 ). Moreover, several glycan structural changes have been identified on specific proteins in different types of cancer, such as gastric, nasopharyngeal or endometrial cancer ( 32 ), and immunoglobulins or glycoregulatory proteins are aberrantly expressed in EC ( 33 , 34 ). These published reports clearly indicate the diverse glycan structures, abundantly present in the human blood circulation and tissues, and can potentially serve as promising biomolecules for biomarker discovery ( 35 ).…”