Imperial receives $4 million for glycomics research

A team of researchers from Imperial College London's Division of Molecular Biosciences has received a grant of over US $4 million to support a research facility for understanding how sugars are involved in cell to cell communication.

The grant forms part of a US $40.7 million award which has been given to the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG) - led from the Scripps Research Institute in California - of which the Imperial team is a part.

The consortium provides resources to more than 300 participating scientists worldwide who are engaged in research aimed at understanding how the sugary layer on the outside of cells enables cell to cell communication.

The Imperial research group will use the grant to focus on analysing the structures of sugars that are attached to lipids and proteins on the outside of cells. This sugary layer interacts with proteins and mediates a large number of cellular functions, so a greater understanding of the sugars that are present in glyco-lipids and glyco-proteins will lead to a better understanding of how cells work and relate to each other.

Professor Anne Dell, Principal Investigator of the Imperial research team explains: "Interaction between sugars and proteins is central to a large number of key cell functions, such as species-specific recognition of sperm by eggs in the reproductive process, and targeting white blood cells to the site of an infection. By looking at the structures of the sugars involved in these functions in greater detail than ever before, we will gain a better understanding of how these biological functions work, and why they sometimes go wrong.

"Our grant, which will enable us to continue to work as parts of Scripps' international consortium on glycomics, means we will be able to provide scientific and medical researchers from around the world with detailed structural elucidation of sugars for cellular, biological and medical research."

The five-year grant, provided by the American National Institute of General Medical Science (NIGMS) is the second such grant that the consortium - divided up into separate scientific 'corps' in different countries - has received. The first, awarded in 2001, was a five-year grant of US $34 million.

The Scripps Consortium for Functional Glycomics 'glues' together the work of investigators from around the world, and the NIGMS grant will provide the funds to accelerate research into this critically important field. The long term goal of the Consortium under the new research grant is to understand the mechanisms through which carbohydrate-binding proteins mediate cell function.

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