Research Projects

The attachment of glycans to proteins, forming glycoproteins, dramatically enhances the immunogenic potential of glycan antigens, underpinning the use of glycoprotein vaccine candidates widely referred to as glycoconjugate vaccines. While some of the safest and most potent vaccines used today are glycoconjugate vaccines, the creation of this class of vaccines can be extremely challenging as glycans need to be chemically grafted onto proteins. While this is difficult to achieve using chemical approaches, biological systems can efficiently generate glycoconjugates through a process known as protein glycosylation. This project seeks to develop new tools for exploiting bacterial protein glycosylation to produce glycoconjugates for the generation of vaccines as well as glycan specific antibodies against bacterial pathogens. By characterizing and testing the capacity of new enzymes and cloning approaches to generate glycoconjugate vaccines, our goal is to define a toolkit of enzymes/tools that can be rapidly deployed to produce vaccines and monoclonal antibodies to combat the growing health threat of antibiotic-resistant infections.

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