Glycan analysis by ion mobility-mass spectrometry and gas-phase spectroscopy

[Display omitted] •Ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) based methods can be used to elucidate complex glycans.•IM-MS enables coarse separation of molecular classes and rapid screening of specific glycan features.•Gas-phase IR spectroscopy was used to obtain vibrational fingerprints of glycans.•IMS can be used as filter method for hyphenated methods such as IR spectroscopy. Due to the existence of numerous isomers, the in-depth analysis of glycans represents a major challenge. Currently, the majority of glycans are analysed using mass spectrometry (MS)-based techniques, which can provide information on regioisomers but usually fail to differentiate stereoisomers. A promising approach to overcome this limitation is to implement ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) as an additional gas-phase separation dimension. This review highlights recent developments in which IM-MS was used as a tool for comprehensive glycan analysis or as rapid screening method for glycan feature analysis. Furthermore, we summarize a series of very recent investigations in which gas-phase spectroscopy is applied to study glycans and discuss the potential of the hyphenation between IM-MS and infrared (IR) spectroscopy as a future tool for glycomics and glycoproteomics.