Isolation of Human Milk Difucosyl Nona- and Decasaccharides by Ultrahigh-Temperature Preparative PGC-HPLC and Identification of Novel Difucosylated Heptaose and Octaose Backbones by Negative-Ion ESI-MS n

Despite their many important physiological functions, past work on the diverse sequences of human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) has been focused mainly on the highly abundant HMOs with a relatively low degree of polymerization (DP) due to the lack of efficient methods for separation/purification and high-sensitivity sequencing of large-sized HMOs with DP ≥ 10. Here we established an ultrahigh-temperature preparative HPLC based on a porous graphitized carbon column at up to 145 °C to overcome the anomeric α/β splitting problem and developed further the negative-ion ESI-CID-MS/MS into multistage MS using a combined product-ion scanning of singly charged molecular ion and doubly charged fragment ion of the branching Gal and adjacent GlcNAc residues. The separation and sequencing method allows efficient separation of a neutral fraction with DP ≥ 10 into 70 components, among which 17 isomeric difucosylated nona- and decasaccharides were further purified and sequenced. As a result, novel branched difucosyl heptaose and octaose backbones were unambiguously identified in addition to the conventional linear and branched octaose backbones. The novel structures of difucosylated DF- -heptaose, DF- -LNO I, and DF- -LNnO I were corroborated by NMR. The various fucose-containing Lewis epitopes identified on different backbones were confirmed by oligosaccharide microarray analysis.