Dr. Jinshan Gao's research interests lie in 1) the development of free radical reagents for glycan and protein structure elucidation, 2) the identification and discovery of potential serum biomarkers for cancers, and 3) study of the molecular mechanism of these diseases by combining biomimetic reagents and high-throughput mass spectrometry. His research team recently developed methylated free radical activated glycan sequencing reagent (Me-FRAGS) which significantly simplify the systematic analysis of complex glycan structures using mass spectrometry.

This approach provides valuable information for glycan structure analysis and offers unique advantages compared to earlier studies. In order to apply this approach to the identification of potential glycan biomarkers for cancers, resin-supported and magnetic nanoparticle-based free radical reagent are being designed and synthesized.

Bioinformatics tools for the analysis of DNA (RNA) and protein sequences have been well developed. However, these tools cannot be directly applied to glycan bioinformatics due to the fact that glycan can exhibit complicated branch structures. As with proteomics, mass spectrometry (MS) has been broadly utilized for the characterization of glycans. Unfortunately, no efficient software tools were available to interpret the spectra due to the complexity of glycan structure. Recently, his group has developed free radical reagents for glycan structure characterization. These free radical reagents exhibit high fragmentation efficiency and systematic fragmentation. However, the interpretation of spectra has to be done manually. In order to overcome this barrier, they developed a glycan fragmentation assignment software denominated as “Glyc”. 

Interests lie in 1) the development of free radical reagents for glycan and protein structure elucidation, 2) the identification and discovery of potential serum biomarkers for cancers, and 3) study of the molecular mechanism of these diseases by combining biomimetic reagents and high-throughput mass spectrometry.

Expert on mass spectrometry, glycomics, proteomics, and gas-phase free radical.