Researchers apply systems biology and glycomics to study human inflammator...(late the adhesivity of white blood cells...)

Glycans are carbohydrate molecules that mediate the microscopic interactions between white blood cells and blood vessel walls. These interactions play a major role in painful and debilitating inflammatory medical conditions such as asthma, psoriasis, Crohn's disease, reperfusion injury and other cardiovascular ailments.

In a recent paper in The FASEB Journal, the UB researchers describe one of the first studies to take a systems approach to the study of cellular glycosylation, the modification process that is responsible for the attachment of sugar structures to protein and lipid scaffolds. Such biochemical modifications are critical to diverse biological processes, including cell/organ development, immunity and cell adhesion. Abnormal glycosylation also is implicated in diverse diseases, including certain cardiovascular diseases and a cluster of congenital diseases termed Congenital Disorders of Glycosylation.

The paper demonstrates experimental techniques that measure enzyme reaction rates involved in glycosylation, and then draw critical correlations with gene expression, enzyme kinetics and the structures of glycans.

"These techniques enable us to move from genes to proteins and finally to the structures of glycans on cells and individual proteins," said Neelamegham.

The UB paper in Bioinformatics describes a computer model that uses the data produced by those experiments to establish a basis for predicting the structures of glycans on cell surfaces.

"The data produced experimentally allows us to determine key steps in the glycome reaction network that controls the final glycan structure that appears on cells," Neelamegham explained. "This approach then provides an in silico tool that can be applied to perturb the system of interest, such as the glycosylation network."

Those studies, in turn, he continued, can then generat
'/>"/>