Amino Sugars Analysis: Identification and Quantification, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Health sciences

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Amino sugars are chemical compounds that have a sugar backbone, in which one of the hydroxyl groups is replaced by an amine group. Derivatives of amine-containing sugars, such as N-acetylglucosamine, are also considered amino sugars. Incorporated into protein-linked sugar chains, amino sugars regulate protein function and, combined with other compounds, form antibiotics.

Figure. Amino sugars. The monosaccharides glucosamine and galactosamine are amino sugars with the amino group in place of a hydroxyl group. Amino sugars are widely associated with structural polysaccharides or glycolipids, and they have been proposed as biomarkers for organic matter sources and their digenetic state. Three vital amino sugars are of physiological importance, namely glucosamine, galactosamine and neuraminic acid. Glucosamine and galactosamine are derived from glucose and galactose respectively, the amino group in each case replacing the hydroxyl group on C-2. Neuraminic acid is more complex. It is a nine-carbon amino sugar formed by the condensation of mannosamine 6-phosphate and phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP). It is the parent substance of the sialic acids that are acyl derivatives of neuraminic acid, e.g. N -acetylneuraminic acid. Sialic acids are found as constituents of glycoproteins and glycolipids and are

believed to have an important bearing on the formation of the acquired integuments of the teeth.

Figure 2. The important function of amino sugars. Several methods for the determination of amino sugars have been published. Highly specific gas chromatographic analyses require difficult off-line derivatisation steps, e.g. derivatisation of the hydrolysis products in volatile aldononitrile acetates. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods need either derivatisation steps or special equipment for anion exchange chromatography combined with pulsed amperometric detection. This means that HPLC methods are generally less time-consuming as they employ no or automated on-line derivatisation. Here Creative Proteomics