Affiliations: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology,
Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, University of Zagreb, Zagreb,
Croatia
Note: [] Corresponding author. Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, Ante
Kovačića 1, Zagreb, HR 10 000, Croatia. Tel.: +385 1 4818 757; Fax: +385
1 4856 201; E-mail: glauc@pharma.hr
Abstract: Inflammatory diseases are accompanied by numerous changes at the
site of inflammation as well as many systemic physiological and biochemical
changes. In the past two decades more and more attention is being paid to
changes in glycosylation and in this review we describe some of the changes
found on main serum proteins (α1-acid glycoprotein,
immunoglobulin G, immunoglobulin A, transferrin, haptoglobin, α2-macroglobulin,
C-reactive protein, and others). Molecular
background and physiological importance of most of these changes are yet to be
discovered, but it is evident that glycosylation plays an important role in the
inflammatory response. Maybe the greatest value of these changes currently lays
in their potential diagnostic and prognostic usage, either in combination with
current diagnostic markers or on their own. However, determining glycan
structures is still technically too complex for most clinical laboratories and
further efforts have to be made to develop simple analytical tools to study
changes in glycosylation.
