Glycosylation changes are a universal feature of malignant transformation and tumor progression. Changes in expression levels of certain glycoproteins and altered glycosylation patterns have been detected in most of the major human cancer types and at different stages of tumor progression. The early detection of glycosylation changes is therefore crucial for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Currently, the methods for glycosylation analysis require expensive instruments and are time consuming. Thus, there is a need to develop new reagents and simpler methods to study carbohydrate modifications of proteins in cancer biology. Our long term goal is to develop new research reagents for basic cancer researchers in the form of antibodies against N- or O-linked carbohydrate antigens in proteins. In the Phase I proposal, we propose to generate over 32 chicken polyclonal (Task 1) and 2-3 monoclonal IgY (Task 2) ? against specific Oglycosylation sites. In addition, we will use our proprietary PINCER? platform technology to develop 5 costeffective, simple and fast assays (Task 3) to detect protein glycosylation using existing commercially available antibodies. We expect that these PINCER? reagents can be used to not only develop homogeneous assays for detecting protein glycosylation, but can also be used as unique imaging reagents.
