One of the most widely used tools for probing glycan-protein interactions is glycan arrays. A glycan array usually is an NHS- or epoxy-activated glass slides on which various glycans were printed using robotic printing. These commercially available arrays may contain up to 600 different glycans, specificity of which has been extensively studied.
Glycan-protein interactions may be detected by testing proteins of interest (or libraries of those) that bear fluorescent tags. The structure of the glycan-binding protein may be deciphered by several analytical methods based on mass-spectrometry, including MALDI-MS, LC-MS, tandem MS-MS, and/or 2D NMR.