Aberrant glycosylation is not only a feature of malignant cell transformation, but also plays an important role in
metastasis. In the present study, an integrated strategy combining the
lectin microarrays and
lectin cytochemistry was employed to investigate and verify the altered glycopatterns in
gastric cancer (GC) cell lines as well as resected
tumor specimens from matched tissue sets of 46 GC patients. Subsequently,
lectin-mediated affinity capture
glycoproteins, and MALDI-TOF/TOF-MS were employed to further acquire precise structural information of the altered
glycans. According to the results, the glycopatterns recognized by 10 (e.g., ACA, MAL-I, and ConA) and 3
lectins (PNA, MAL-I, and VVA) showed significantly variations in GC cells and tissue compared to their corresponding controls, respectively. Notably, the relative abundance of GalĪ²-1,4GlcNAc (LacNAc) recognized by MAL-I exhibited a significant increase in GC cells (p < 0.001) and tissue from patients at stage II and III (p < 0.05), and a significant increase in lymph node positive
tumor cases, compared with lymph node negative
tumor cases (p < 0.05). More LacNAc contained N-
glycans were characterized in
tumor sample with advanced stage compared to corresponding control. Moreover, there were 10 neo-LacNAc-contained N-
glycans (e.g., m/z 1625.605, 1803.652, and 1914.671) only presented in GC tissue with advanced stage. Among these, six N-
glycans were modified with
sialic acid or
fucose based on LacNAc to form sialylated N-
glycans or
lewis antigens, respectively. Our results revealed that the aberrant expression of LacNAc is a characteristic of GC, and LacNAc may serve as a scaffold to be further modified with
sialic acid or
fucose. Our findings provided useful information for us to understand the development of GC.