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Abstract

Protonated ions of fucose-containing oligosaccharides are prone to undergo internal glycan rearrangement which results in chimeric fragments that obfuscate a mass- spectrometric analysis. Lack of accessible tools that would facilitate systematic analysis of glycans in the gas phase limits our understanding of this phenomenon. In this work, we use density functional theory modeling to interpret cryogenic IR spectra of Lewis a and blood group type H1 trisaccharides and to establish whether these trisaccharides undergo the rearrangement during gas-phase analysis. Structurally-unconstrained search reveals that none of the parent ions constitute a thermodynamic global minimum. In contrary, predicted collision cross sections and anharmonic IR spectra provide a good match to available experimental data which allowed us to conclude that the fucose migration does not occur in these antigens. By comparing the predicted structures with those obtained for Lewis x and blood group type H2 epitopes, we demonstrate that the availability of the mobile proton and a large difference in relative stability of the parent ions and rearrangement products constitute the prereqisites for the rearrangement reaction.