Mass Spectrometry-Based Determination of Thyroid Hormones and Their Metabolites in Endocrine Diagnostics and Biomedical Research – Implications for Human Serum Diagnostics

The wide spectrum of novel applications for the LC-MS/MS-based analysis of thyroid hormone metabolites (THM) in blood samples and other biological specimen highlights the perspectives of this novel technology. However, thorough development of pre-analytical sample workup and careful validation of both pre-analytics and LC-MS/MS analytics, is needed, to allow for quantitative detection of the thyronome, which spans a broad concentration range in these biological samples.This minireview summarizes recent developments in advancing LC-MS/MS-based analytics and measurement of total concentrations of THM in blood specimen of humans, methods in part further refined in the context of previous achievements analyzing samples derived from cell-culture or tissues. Challenges and solutions to tackle efficient pre-analytic sample extraction and elimination of matrix interferences are compared. Options for automatization of pre-analytic sample-preparation and comprehensive coverage of the wide thyronome concentration range are presented. Conventional immunoassay versus LC-MS/MS-based determination of total and free THM concentrations are briefly compared.

On enzymatic remodeling of IgG glycosylation; unique tools with broad applications

The importance of IgG glycosylation has been known for many years not only by scientists in glycobiology but also by human pathogens that have evolved specific enzymes to modify these glycans with fundamental impact on IgG function. The rise of IgG as a major therapeutic scaffold for many cancer and immunological indications combined with the availability of unique enzymes acting specifically on IgG Fc-glycans have spurred a range of applications to study this important post-translational modification on IgG. This review article introduces why the IgG glycans are of distinguished interest, gives a background on the unique enzymatic tools available to study the IgG glycans and finally presents an overview of applications utilizing these enzymes for various modifications of the IgG glycans. The applications covered include site-specific glycan transglycosylation and conjugation, analytical workflows for monoclonal antibodies and serum diagnostics. Additionally, the review looks ahead and discusses the importance of O-glycosylation for IgG3, Fc-fusion proteins and other new formats of biopharmaceuticals.

Investigating optimum sample preparation for infrared spectroscopic serum diagnostics

Biofluids, such as serum and plasma, represent an ideal medium for disease diagnosis due to their non-invasive character, ease of collection, that can be performed worldwide, and their fundamental involvement in human functions.