Lecture: Glycan microarrays - decoding glycan recognition in infection and immunity

Time: July 24, 2018, 9:00 am

Venue: 1st Floor Conference Room, Biotechnology Building

Lecturer: Doctor Liu Yan, Glycosciences Laboratory, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London

Abstract:

Neoglycolipid (NGL)-based microarray system is an advanced glycan array platform that is available to the scientific community for recognition studies of diverse carbohydrate binding systems (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/glycosciences). The clustered and flexible presentation of non-covalently immobilized lipid-linked probes printed in a liposomal formulation on a nitrocellulose matrix renders the NGL system highly sensitive. I will give highlights of the recent contributions of our glycan microarrays in discovery of glycan ligands for proteins of endogenous recognition systems, and those involved in pathogen-host interactions.

Introduction:

Doctor Liu completed her B.Sc. degree in chemistry at the Peking University in 2001, and obtained her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from University of Bristol in 2005, under the guidance of Professor Tim Gallagher. She then joined the group of Professor Ten Feizi as one of the postdoc researchers funded by the UK Glycoarray Consortium and developed novel glycan probes for microarray studies. She was a named experienced investigator on the EPSRC Translational grant during 2008-2012 and her work has been extended to microarray analyses of diverse glycan-binding systems, notable among which are pandemic 2009 H1N1 influenza virus and other human pathogenic viruses of Papillomaviridae, Polyomaviridae and Adenoviridae families, Toxoplasma gondii and related apicomplexan parasites, and the broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies. Since 2013, Doctor Liu has been leading the Wellcome Trust-funded Carbohydrate Microarray Facility as a biomedical resource for the broad scientific community. Her expertise in the field of glycan arrays has been well recognized internationally. She is a member of the MIRAGE (Minimum Information Required for A Glycomics Experiment) Commission and the lead author of the recently published MIRAGE glycan microarray guidelines. Doctor Liu is an accomplished chemist/glycobiologist with over 60 publications. Her main research interest is to develop ultrasensitive approaches to understand the roles of carbohydrate molecules in pathogen-host interactions and as potential biomarkers for infectious diseases and autoimmune diseases.

Contact: Doctor Guo Zhimou, Group 1803 Phone: 0411-84379539