Chemometric Analysis For Comparison Of Heparan Sulphate Oligosacharides

Main Category: Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 21 Jan 2009 - 7:00 PDT

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Heparan sulphate (HS) is a glycosaminoglycan present in all metazoan organisms. It is an unbranched chain made up of a repeating disaccharide units of uronic acid and glucosamine sugars, and is present in both cells and the extracellular matrix. It is one of the most structurally diverse biological molecules and its biosynthesis involves a variety of enzymic modification steps.

To study this structural diversity of HS rapid isolation and characterization of HS from small amounts of tissues, followed by digestion with bacterially-derived enzymes (heparitinases) and chromatography techniques can be used to separate HS oligosaccharides of different size and charge.

Using automatically integrated peak data obtained from chromatographic software one can apply the effective disc technique to the data points to obtain the centre of mass in each set data, for example from different murine tissues. When the cloud of points displays some preferential direction (anisotropy), it is preferable to compute its effective ellipse.

Analysis of the dynamics of the cloud of points for repeated experiments allows quantification of their reproducibility through evaluation of an average Lyapounov exponent characterizing the area-preserving nature of a sequence of effective ellipses.

Journal of the Royal Society Interface

Journal of the Royal Society Interface is the Society's cross-disciplinary publication promoting research at the interface between the physical and life sciences. It offers rapidity, visibility and high-quality peer review and is ranked fifth in JCR's multidisciplinary category. The journal also incorporates Interface Focus, a peer-reviewed, themed supplement, each issue of which concentrates on a specific cross-disciplinary subject.

Journal of the Royal Society Interface