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News and events

Recent news and events

The Royal Society of Chemistry Carbohydrate Group Spring meeting will be held at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London. Professor Ten Feizi’s Haworth Memorial prize lectureship will be presented at the meeting on the 3rd of April. (link)

Glycoinformatics Consortium (GLIC) webinar series with the special topic – glycan microarray associated software and application tools. (link) Yukie Akune in our group gave a talk entitled “CarbArrayART for glycan microarray data storage, presentation and reporting” on the 13th of February.

New publication from the collaborative work at our Facility! Sorin MN, Di Maio A, Silva LM, Ebert D, Delannoy CP, Nguyen NK, Guerardel Y, Chai W, Halary F, Renaudin-Autain K, Liu Y, Bressollette-Bodin C, Stehle T, McIlroy D. Structural and functional analysis of natural capsid variants suggests sialic acid-independent entry of BK polyomavirus. Cell Rep. 2023 Feb; 42(2):112114. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2023.112114. PMID: 36790933; PMCID: PMC9989821.

The kick-off meeting of all EU patterners on the EU “GLYCOTwinning” network grant will be held in Lisbon on 18th-19th Jan 2023. As part of this Twinning work programme, we will contribute to the exploratory research project aimed at understanding microbiome interactions with host glycans of colorectal cancer cells, potentiating the development of innovative glycan-based tools and therapies.

New publication from the collaborative work at our Facility! Clark LC, Atkin KE, Whelan F, Brentnall AS, Harris G, Towell AM, Turkenburg JP, Liu Y, Feizi T, Griffiths SC, Geoghegan JA, Potts JR. Staphylococcal Periscope proteins Aap, SasG, and Pls project noncanonical legume-like lectin adhesin domains from the bacterial surface. J Biol Chem. 2023 Jan; 299(3):102936. doi: 10.1016/j.jbc.2023.102936. PMID: 36702253 PMCID: PMC9999234

New publication from the collaborative work at our Facility! Shahin M, Sheppard D, Raynaud C, Berry JL, Gurung I, Silva LM, Feizi T, Liu Y, Pelicic V. Characterization of a glycan-binding complex of minor pilins completes the analysis of Streptococcus sanguinis type 4 pili subunits. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Jan; 120(3):e2216237120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2216237120. PMID: 36626560 PMCID: PMC9934059

New publication from the collaborative work at our Facility! Shahin M, Sheppard D, Raynaud C, Berry JL, Gurung I, Silva LM, Feizi T, Liu Y, Pelicic V. Full structure/function analysis of all the pilin subunits in a type 4 pilus: a complex of minor pilins in Streptococcus sanguinis mediates binding to glycans. bioRxiv (2022): 2022-08. doi: doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.25.505150

Welcome Dr Apoorva D Srivastava joined the group as a Research Associate in our Wellcome Trust Facility project.
Welcome Undergraduate student Hannah Pitchford who joined the group for her 3-month project under the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programme (UROP).

Royal Society’s New Fellows Admission Day Professor Ten Feizi was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society at the Admission Ceremony for 2021 New Fellows held at Carlton House Terrace on 24th June 2022.

The Glycosciences Laboratory has been awarded a Horizon Europe Twinning grant entitled “GLYCOTwinning” (1.5M EUR total, 248K EUR to Imperial). This is a three-year capacity-building project that has the ambitious goal to advance the research excellence in Glycosciences at the interface of chemistry, biology and microbiology at four leading centres: NOVA University of Lisbon (lead applicants), Imperial College London, Leiden University Medical Centre, and Centre for Cooperative Research in Biosciences (Derio, Spain).

Our new software tool is live! Akune Y, Arpinar S, Silva LM, Palma AS, Tajadura-Ortega V, Aoki-Kinoshita KF, Ranzinger R, Liu Y, Feizi T. CarbArrayART: a new software tool for carbohydrate microarray data storage, processing, presentation, and reporting. Glycobiology. 2022 Jun; 32(7):552-555. doi: 10.1093/glycob/cwac018. PMID: 35352122 PMCID: PMC9191619

Welcome to the group, XiaoJia Liu (MRes Chemical Biology) and David Sharp (PhD)! Xiaojia and David are from Department of Chemistry under joint supervision by Dr Ben Schumann and Dr Yan Liu.

Warmest congratulations to Professor Ten Feizi who has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for her pioneering work in assignments of biological roles to glycan sequences in developmental and disease-associated processes (https://royalsociety.org/people/ten-feizi-35022/)
Antonio di Maio joins our Wellcome Trust Carbohydrate Microarray Facility as Microarray Project Leader
Welcome to Masters students Daniel Brown and Jade Cobham who joined the group for their 5-month projects under joint supervision by Dr Yan Liu and Dr Alexiane Decout

Welcome to Dr Yan Liu’s new PhD students joining the group: Vladimir Bokun and Yuan Chen!
Congratulations to Vladimir who has been awarded the President's PhD Scholarship 2020.

Welcome to Dr Alexiane Decout who has joined IRDB with her prestigious Imperial College Research Fellowship! Alexiane’s programme aims at understanding how the vaginal microbiota modulate the innate immune system, especially via C-type lectin whose stimulation can variously mitigate of predispose to preterm birth.

Welcome to Dr Jodie Abrahams who has joined the group as a Research Associate in our Wellcome Trust Carbohydrate Microarray Facility

Professor Ten Feizi received the 2020 Haworth Memorial Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry Carbohydrate Group for her pioneering development of glycan microarrays. (https://www.rsc.org/news-events/community/2020/apr/2020-haworth-memorial-lectureship/) Congratulations, Ten!

Liz was Emeritus Professor of Biological Chemistry at Birkbeck College London and was one of the pioneers in the application of modern analytical techniques to structure determination of immunologically active and other biologically important oligosaccharides. Liz, a former Research Associate in the Glycosciences Laboratory is fondly remembered for her enthusiasm and quick mind; she was always great company both socially and in the laboratory.

Grant to celebrate: We have received a new £1.34M Wellcome Trust Biomedical Resource Grant (2019-2023) to support our Carbohydrate Microarray Facility “Carbohydrate Microarray Facility for the New Era of Glycomics” Press release