Licorice is known as “Gan-Cao” in traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), belonging to the genus Glycyrrhiza (Family: Fabaceae/Leguminosae). It has a long medicinal history and wide applications in China. Polysaccharides of licorice (LPs) are one of the key bioactive components. As herbal polysaccharides attracted increasing interest in the past several decades, their extraction, isolation, structural characterization, pharmacological activities, and medicinal application have been explored extensively. It is worth heeding that the method of extraction and purification effects LPs, apart from specie and origin specificity. This review evaluates the method of extraction and purification and demonstrates its performance in gaining specific composition and its structure-activity relationship, which might lead the readers to a fresh horizon for developing advanced treatment strategies. It is recently reported that the conformation of LPs plays a vital role as biopolymers, such as selenized modification, microencapsulation, nanocomposite, liposome formulation, drug/hydrogel combinations, biosensor device, and synergistic effect with a vaccine. In addition, LPs showed a good thermodynamics profile, as these properties enable them to interact with additional supramolecular interaction by chemical modifications or copolymerization. Functional polymers that are responsive to various external stimuli, such as physical, chemical, and biological signals, are a promising study topic. Thus, LPs are emerging as a new biomaterial that can enhance intended formulation along exerting its inherent medicinal effects. It is hoped that this review will provide a basis for the utilization and further developments of licorice polysaccharides in the vast medium.

The glycosylation of proteins is responsible for their structural and functional roles in many cellular activities. This work describes a strategy that combines an efficient release, labeling and liquid chromatography-mass spectral analysis with the use of a comprehensive database to analyze N-glycans. The analytical method described relies on a recently commercialized kit in which quick deglycosylation is followed by rapid labeling and cleanup of labeled glycans. This greatly improves the separation, mass spectrometry (MS) analysis and fluorescence detection of N-glycans. A hypothetical database, constructed using GlycResoft, provides all compositional possibilities of N-glycans based on the common sugar residues found in N-glycans. In the initial version this database contains >8,700 N-glycans, and is compatible with MS instrument software and expandable. N-glycans from four different well-studied glycoproteins were analyzed by this strategy. The results provided much more accurate and comprehensive data than had been previously reported. This strategy was then used to analyze the N-glycans present on the membrane glycoproteins of gastric carcinoma cells with different degrees of differentiation. Accurate and comprehensive N-glycan data from those cells was obtained efficiently and their differences compared corresponding to their differentiation states. Thus, the novel strategy developed greatly improves accuracy, efficiency and comprehensiveness of N-glycan analysis.