Structural Glycobiology

Carbohydrates are essential biomolecules, found without exception in every cell of our body. Macromolecular carbohydrates in biology can adopt many different structures, enabling their participation in a huge range of essential functions, including protein folding, cell-signalling, cell adhesion, developmental patterning, maintenance of structural barrier functions, and uptake of extracellular cargoes.

In keeping with their essential biological roles, carbohydrate molecules are also key drivers of many disease processes.  Many bacteria, viruses and other pathogens use cell-surface carbohydrates to bind and enter cells. Carbohydrate patterns are altered in cancers, supporting biological changes that increase tumour growth and resistance. Congenital dysregulation of carbohydrates is also associated with devastating metabolic diseases, affecting multiple organ systems and severely limiting length and quality of life.

Despite the importance of biological carbohydrates across health and disease, very little is known about how these complex molecules are regulated. Our group is interested in understanding the molecular basis of biological carbohydrate processing, with a particular focus on the heparan sulfate class of polysaccharides. We aim to connect molecular scale dissection of how individual carbohydrate-processing enzymes function, with broader scale understanding of how enzyme networks cooperate within complex intracellular environments, including during disease states.

Given the broad range of roles performed by carbohydrates in biology, opportunities for biomedical and biotechnological exploitation are myriad. Improved characterisation of biological regulatory mechanisms will provide important insights into how carbohydrates participate in diseases such as infections and cancers, opening the possibility of diagnosis or therapeutics.