The Chemical Glycobiology Laboratory recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing GalNAzMe, a "precision tool" to investigate carbohydrates, or glycans, that are heavily associated with cancer formation. Conventional probes for so-called O-GalNAc glycans are often converted to other sugars by metabolism inside the cell, and this can cause issues with tracking the glycoprotein of interest using methods of modern biology. We eliminated this by targeted design of GalNAzMe, which is not amenable to interconversion due to its molecular structure. We then use a process called click chemistry to tag GalNAzMe decorated glycoproteins with fluorophores or biotin for our studies. We show that GalNAzMe is applicable to many different experimental techniques such as superresolution microscopy, glycoproteomics and labeling of gut organoids. The work was a great example of international and local collaboration with the Bertozzi and Moerner labs at Stanford University, the Stem Cell and Cancer Biology Laboratory headed by Vivan Li, the Crick Proteomics STP and many other labs, led by Senior Laboratory Research Scientist Dr. Omur Yilmaz Tastan at the Crick and Marjoke Debets at Stanford.
