Synthetic Glycomes

Wanyi Guan is an associate professor in the College of Life Science, Heibei Normal University, China. She received her PhD from Shandong University in 2011 in Microbiology and Glycobiology. During her joint PhD program at Ohio State University, she focused on substrate specificity study of enzymes involving in salvage pathway of UDP-GlcNAc/UDP-GalNAc synthesis, large-scale chemoenzymatic synthesis of UDP-GlcNAc/UDP-GalNAc and their analogs, as well as the application of the sugar nucleotide analogs. She joined the faculty of College of Life Science, Hebei Normal University, China in 2011 as a lecturer, and was promoted to associate professor in 2013. Dr Guan is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in Department of Chemistry, Georgia State University. Her research interests involve the isolation of abundant glycans from natural sources, and enzymatic synthesis of glycans with glycosyltransferases (especially mammalian glycosyltransferases whose functions are unique from bacterial glycosyltransferases).

Lei Li is a research assistant professor in Department of Chemistry, Georgia State University. He received his PhD from Shandong University in 2010 in Microbiology and Glycochemistry. As a joint PhD student at Ohio State University, he carried out biochemical characterization of the lipopolysaccharide biosynthetic pathway of E. coli O86, and basic research on bacterial N-glycosylation pathway, and using involved glycosyltransferases to synthesize natural and non-natural glycans. Such work had resulted in several peer-reviewed publications. At Nankai University as a PI, he had successfully administered (including staffing, research protections, budget) two projects (supported by NSFC and CPSF of China), collaborated with other researchers, and produced publications from each project. After that, since 2013, Dr Li has been working on developing facile strategies for rapid access of complex human glycans, such as N-glycans and O-glycans. This work had already resulted 5 peer-reviewed publications, in which we developed efficient approaches for chemoenzymatic synthesis of sugar nucleotides, sialiodases and importantly, an N-glycan isomer library (73 N-glycans). The technology is named “Chemical synthesis/Enzymatic extension” (CSEE). Based on the successes on using CSEE, they applied and were awarded an NIH common fund for Glycoscience to developed facile ways to access complex O-glycans and glycopeptides.