To study how the interaction between N-linked glycans and the surrounding amino acids influences oligosaccharide processing, we used protein disulfide isomerase (PDI), a glycoprotein bearing 5 N-glycosylation sites, as a model system and expressed it transiently in a Chinese hamster ovary (CHO)-S cell line. PDI was produced as both secreted Sec-PDI and endoplasmic reticulum-retained glycoprotein (ER)-PDI, to study glycan processing by ER and Golgi resident enzymes. Quantitative site-specific glycosylation profiles were obtained, and flux analysis enabled modeling site-specific glycan processing. By altering the primary sequence of PDI, we changed the glycan/ protein interaction and thus the site-specific glycoprofile because of the improved enzymatic fluxes at enzymatic bottlenecks. Our results highlight the importance of direct interactions between N-glycans and surface-exposed amino acids of glycoproteins on processing in the ER and the Golgi and the possibility of changing a site-specific N-glycan profile by modulating such interactions and thus the associated enzymatic fluxes. Altering the primary protein sequence can therefore be used to glycoengineer recombinant proteins.-Losfeld, M.-E., Scibona, E., Lin, C.-W., Villiger, T. K., Gauss, R., Morbidelli, M., Aebi, M. Influence of protein/glycan interaction on site-specific glycan heterogeneity. FASEB J. 31, 4623-4635 (2017). www.fasebj.org KEY WORDS: glycoengineering • glycobiology • glycoprotein maturation • Golgi processing • enzymatic flux N-glycosylation is a major posttranslational modification of proteins that modulates folding, maturation, trafficking, and secretion, as well as specific protein functions (1-3). Contrary to many other posttranslational modifications, N-glycans are composed of many monosaccharide units, creating a large diversity of glycan structures (4, 5). In eukaryotic cells, the N-glycosylation occurs in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) after a conserved pathway. The oligosaccharide GlcNAc 2 Man 9 Glc 3 is assembled on the lipid dolicholpyrophosphate at the membrane of the ER and then is covalently linked to the side-chain amide of the asparagine residue in the sequon N-X-S/T by oligosaccharyltransferase (OST) (1, 6, 7). Multiple sites on one glycoprotein can be modified by the OST complex and with the increasing complexity of multicellular organism, an increasing number of N-glycosylation sites in the glycoproteome are observed. It is estimated that up to 6000 different sites are modified by OST in mammalian cells (8). In the second phase of the N-glycosylation pathway, the protein-linked glycan is trimmed by glucosidases and mannosidases (1, 9) and is subsequently modified by different glycosyltransferases spatially distributed along the secretory pathway. N-glycan processing enzymes have defined substrate specificities and locations in the secretory pathway (9, 10), and their expression level can be regulated upon internal and external signals.Glycan maturation in the secretory pathway is not a template-driven process. The...