Natural and unnatural glycosides for novel drug discovery
Glycosylated natural products hold high promise in the development of small molecule drugs due to their innate antimicrobial, antitumor, and immunological activities.
However, glycosides remain vastly underexplored in the context of medicinal chemistry, where the lack of a detailed structure-function relationship precludes the correlation of sugar substituents to biological activity.
This limitation is rooted in the low abundance of naturally occurring glycosides, as well as in the lack of effective synthetic chemical tools for their (glyco)diversification.
Combining synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, as well as synthetic and analytical chemistry
Natural glycoside biosynthesis
Biosynthesis of terpene-based glycosides in engineered microbes
Glycodiversification of natural products
Directed evolution of glycosyl-transferases towards diversification
with non-native sugars and sugar sequences
Automated glycan synthesis
An automated platform for the enzymatic synthesis of designer glycan sequences as a general tool for glycobiology research