Polysialic acid, a collective name for linear polymers of sialic acid, are widely expressed in nature (in animal and human brains, bacteria, fish, and a variety of cancers) and modulate cell-cell interaction, neural plasticity, and tumor metastasis. There is a need for sensitive methods to accurately determine degree of polymerization (DP) for polysialic acid as it is critical to its function.This presentation describes a High Performance Anion Exchange � Pulsed Amperometric Detection based method to achieve better resolution for polysialic acids. A CarboPac PA200 column specially developed to provide high resolution separation of oligosaccharides was used to analyze colominic acid (homopolymer of N-acetylneuraminic acid). The Proposed method resolves homologues with DP up to 100 in 70 minutes (with acetate gradient) and 140 in 90 min (with nitrate gradient) - an improvement over the maximum DP (about 60 for acetate and 80 for nitrate) that could be achieved using other columns.

Polysialic acid: Resolving homologues with higher degree of polymerization

244th National Meeting (2012)

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