Glycans are directly involved in the pathology of many major diseases. Glycosylated biomolecules are involved in biological functions including cell signaling, cell growth, immunity, three-dimensional protein folding and target interaction. However, medical benefits resulting from glycobiology are largely untapped because glycans are not well understood. The creation of a comprehensive glycoscience toolkit - including glycan libraries - is essential to drive biomedical research in this area. Such libraries would address the paucity of glycans available for high-throughput screening, substrates for enzymology studies, analytical standards, materials for structural studies, and monitoring in therapeutic manufacturing QA/QC. Glycobia Inc. proposes to use its novel bottom-up glycoengineering technology to produce a variety of functional, chemically defined glycan species. Glycobia shall use engineered Escherichia coli to synthesize the building blocks for many human glycans, and further modify them with glycosyltransferases in vitro. In this project, we shall develop our bottom-up glycoengineering technology could then be used to produce glycans for biomedical applications.
