ChemSci Pick of the Week
Warwick Chemistry
paper chosen as ChemSci Pick of the Week
A Warwick-led publication entitled "Coordination-cage-templated multivalent glycan arrays: effects of mixed-glycan composition and chain length on lectin binding" has been chosen as ChemSci Pick of the Week.
In acknowledgement, Prof Michael Ward said,
"This is very welcome recognition of the immense amount of careful work over several years done by the team - particularly Dr Callum Pritchard who led on this project during both his PhD and postdoc and brought it to completion."
Explaining the significance of the work Prof Ward went on to say,
"Molecules covered in sugar units (glycans) stick very well to some types of protein: this is the basis of many biological processes. This is often done using polymers or nanoparticles as the underlying scaffold, with glycan units attached to their surface. The problem with this is that polymers are floppy, and nanoparticles are not all the same size, so it is not completely clear what the interaction geometry is: it is difficult to make a multi-glycan array with predictable shape, size, and arrangement of glycan units which would make studying these interactions simpler.
In this work, in collaboration with Prof Matt Gibson, University of Manchester, our team have shown how a coordination cage - a structurally highly predictable unit - can be used as the basis of assembling in a single step arrays of 24 glycans on their exterior surface, either with all glycans of the same type, or (unusually) having a mixture of two different glycan types in the array. These show the desired attachment to various type of protein and represent a synthetically remarkably simple and highly versatile way to make structurally predictable glycan arrays for protein binding; this method can be adapted to many different glycan combinations in the array."
Read the full article at