Completed Cells, Biochemistry & Physiology Digestion, Kidneys & Other Organs

Carbohydrate Microarray Facility for the New Era of Glycomics

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations Imperial College London · The Francis Crick Institute Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £1.3M
Period Nov 2019 — Oct 2023

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A carbohydrate microarray facility at Imperial College London is building a library of sugar molecules to map how they interact with cells, pathogens, and the immune system. This matters because sugars on cell surfaces—glycans—are the first point of contact for viruses, bacteria, and immune signals, yet they remain far less studied than DNA or proteins. The facility’s unique approach combines high-throughput screening with chemical synthesis to confirm which glycans bind to which biological targets, closing a gap that has slowed progress in glycobiology. If successful, the project will create three new resources: a library of human mucin sugars for studying how microbes attach to the gut and airways; an expanded collection of glycosaminoglycans and brain gangliosides involved in inflammation and neural function; and chemically synthesised glycans guided by screening data. New software will integrate and mine the resulting datasets. These tools could accelerate discovery of drug targets for infections, immune disorders, and cancer, and improve understanding of how pathogens like influenza or *Clostridium difficile* recognise host cells. The work is primarily fundamental science—building infrastructure and foundational knowledge—but past glycan discoveries have already led to vaccines and antiviral therapies.

View original technical description
The Carbohydrate Microarray Facility at Imperial is an internationally leading operation providing collaborations for discoveries of glycan ligands to the biomedical community (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/glycosciences/). Data accrued are making significant contributions to understanding the involvement of specific glycans in health, infections, inflammation, immune responses and cancer. This unique collaborative way of serving the community, with follow-through of data from screening analyses, has enabled substantial advances to be made in glycobiology. Access to ample amounts of glycans that is often required to corroborate assignments from screening analyses has largely depended so far on external collaborations with chemists. New links that we are forging with the Department of Chemistry to provide desired glycans are of fundamental value for the future of the Facility. We are seeking 4 years support to further integrate the new era of glycomics into biology and medicine. We will - develop a unique human epithelial mucin/O-glycome resource for diverse recognition studies, in particular microbe-host interactions. - expand the ‘glycosaminoglycome’ and brain ‘gangliome’ library. - complement and diversify the library of glycan sequences with chemically and chemo-enzymatically synthesized glycans, guided from glycan array data. - introduce new software for integrated data management and data mining of glycome array analyses.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Benjamin Schumann (EPMC Awardee)Phillip Bennett (EPMC Awardee)Ten Feizi (EPMC Awardee)Wengang Chai (EPMC Awardee)Yan Liu (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Carbohydrate Microarray Facility for Biomedical Exploitation
Carbohydrate Microarray Facility for Biomedical Exploitation.
Core Support for Collaborative Research in Glycobiology
Bio-Inspired Tools for Glycoscience
Novel ionic-based tools for glycoscience

Original classification

Biomedical Resources Grant

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.