Oral Presentation 28th Annual Lorne Proteomics Symposium 2023

A Comprehensive Study on Aberrant Glycosylation in the Brain of a Depression Mouse Model (#46)

Hyun Joo An 1 2
  1. Asia Glyomics Reference Site, Daejeon, South Korea
  2. Chungnam National University, Daejeon, South Korea

Depression, a debilitating mental illness with mood disorders, has quietly become a disease that threatens hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Until now, research on depression has mainly focused on behavioral changes and brain morphological changes in depressed patients for diagnosis. However, in order to understand the mechanism of disease and develop therapeutics, research based on a multifaceted approach that can determine changes in biomolecules is absolutely necessary. Glycosylation, one of the most common post-translational modifications (PTMs) of proteins, plays a pivotal role in brain function and neurodevelopment. Recent studies have indicated that glycosylation is highly associated with brain diseases such as neuropsychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. In a previous study, we established a powerful, highly sensitive, and reproducible analytical platform for qualitative and quantitative exploration of the brain glycome, which is comprehensive tissue glyco-capture with porous graphitized carbon (PGC) nanoLC-MS/MS. In addition, the variation and diversity of glycome expression in mammalian brain tissues according to spatial and temporal differences were comprehensively determined and glycome database was constructed to facilitate the exploration of the role of glycosylation in brain functions. In this study, the relationship between depression and glycosylation was investigated by using LC-MS/MS to determine biochemical changes in protein glycosylation in depression-specific brain regions. In particular, we performed the glycomics, proteomics, and glycoproteomics of brain tissue in a mouse model of depression and integrated the data to understand the characteristics of depression in terms of glycosylation. Our findings provide new perspectives on glycosylation in the pathogenesis of depression and may lead to new studies exploring the role of glycosylation in other brain psychiatric disorders.