09:00 – 09:30 Registration – tea/coffee and biscuits

09:30 – 09:35 Introduction: Meeting Chair: Prof Jerry Turnbull (Liverpool University)

09:35 – 09:50 Open Forum: What is Glycomics ?
Chair: Prof J Turnbull

09:50 – 10:20 Chemical Glycomics - From Synthesis to Microarrays and Vaccines
Dr. B. Castagner, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich
Chemical synthesis is a powerful tool for probing glycomics. Well-defined carbohydrates can be used in various assays or microarrays, conjugated to protein for immunisations etc. Some aspects of synthesis of carbohydrates and their use will be presented, including the automation of oligosaccharide synthesis and the recent progress towards a malaria vaccine.

10:20 – 10:40 Designer Glycoarrays
Prof Ten Feizi , MRC Glycosciences Laboratory, Imperial College London, UK
This talk will be focused on a carbohydrate microarray platform designed toward decoding the glyco-code.

10:40 – 10:45 Gold-based glycoarrays: a Generic Platform for High Throughput Interrogation of Carbohydrate-Protein Interactions
Dr Zheng-liang Zhi, Biological Sciences, Liverpool University.

10:55 - 11:20 Mid-morning break: tea/coffee

11.20 –11:40 Counting glycans and glycan-binding receptors
Prof Kurt Drickamer, Division of Molecular Biosciences, Imperial College London, UK
Biological processes mediated by receptors that recognise glycans include cell-cell adhesion, serum glycoprotein turnover and immunity to viral, bacterial and fungal pathogens. Genomic analysis suggests that there are roughly a hundred different sugar-binding receptors in humans. Analysis with glycan arrays reveals that many of these receptors recognise broad classes of glycans, while only a few show highly selective binding to specific subsets of oligosaccharides. From these results, it is difficult to explain the biological significance of the enormous diversity of glycan structures, which substantially exceeds the number of receptors so far identified.

11:40 – 12:00 Mass spectrometric strategies for glycomics and glyco-proteomics
Dr Stuart Haslam, Division of Molecular Biosciences, Imperial College London, UK
Carbohydrates as constituents of glycoconjugates such as glycoproteins and glycolipids are increasingly being implicated in a wide diversity of biological and biomedical processes. However a major area of concern is that detailed structural knowledge of such carbohydrates are still limited. Our laboratory is addressing this problem by performing detailed mass spectrometric structural characterisation to produce glycosylation profiles of individual cell types, parasitic and free living nematodes, mice organs and human tissues. Additionally we are defining the glycans present on individual glycoproteins and sites of glycan occupancy by application of glycoproteomic strategies.

12:00 – 12:20 Enhancing our Understanding of Glyco-Structure using MSn
Dr Rachel Martin, Shimadzu Biotech, UK
Mass spectrometry will be demonstrated as a useful tool for the disassembly of carbohydrate structures providing a valuable insight into the structure and functionality of complex glycans. Post translational modifications of proteins are also considered and their nature and location investigated.

12:20 – 12:25 Novel Approach for high-throughput glycoprotein profiling in serum using a boronic acid glyco-chip and SELDI-tof.
Mr Johannes Stanta, Inst. of Biotechnology, University of Cambridge
A new Ciphergen proteinchip affinity surface for SELDI-tof analysis was designed with the aim to capture and analyse glycoproteins from complex mixtures such as rat and human blood serum. In a preliminary study the chips have been used to screen 42 blood samples from schizophrenic patients and healthy controls to identify differences between the two groups. Crude blood serum was fractionated on-chip and analysed with SELDI-tof. As a result we identified several putative biomarkers in the mass range between 3 and 5 kDa.

12:25 – 12:45 Predicting and exploiting glycoside biosynthesis
Prof Rob Field, Dept Biological Chemistry, John Innes Institute, Norwich, UK
Recent advances in chemical and enzymatic carbohydrate chemistry make access to complex glycoconjugates much more practical. Studies aimed at probing substrate recognition and enzyme/gene function will be presented. Exploitation of enzymes in the manipulation of antibiotic glycosylation will also be discussed.

13.00 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 14:20 Glycoinformatics and molecular modelling
Prof. Serge.Perez, CERMEV, National Center for Scientific Research, Grenoble, France.

14:20 – 14:40 The role of informatics in glycomics
Dr. Willi von der Lieth, Germany
The talk reviews the current status of bioinformatics applications and databases in glycobiology, which are based on informatics approaches for glycobiology, where an explicit encoding of glycan structures is required. Although there has been an immense development in recent years of new glyco-related data collections as well as informatics tools and several efforts have been started to cross-link and reference the various data deposited in distributed databases, informatics for glycobiology and glycomics can still be considered as being in its infancy when compared to the genomics and proteomics.

14:40 - 15:00 A strategy for discovery and testing of potential glycosylated cancer biomarkers
Prof. Pauline Rudd, NIBRT Dublin Oxford Glycobiology Laboratory, UC Dublin

15:15 – 15:45 Afternoon Tea/Coffee

15:45 – 16:05 Measurement and control of biopharmaceutical glycosylation - the changing regulatory landscape
Dr Daryl Fernandez, Ludger Ltd
The measurement and control of glycosylation is one of the most challenging problems in the manufacture of therapeutic glycoproteins from the blockbuster drug erythropoietin (EPO) to antibody drugs such as Herceptin. This process is difficult and expensive and when it goes wrong - which it sometimes does - it can have serious consequences for the safety and efficacy of the therapeutic.

This talk overviews the changes in the regulatory frameworks in Europe and the US relevant to the control and optimisation of biopharmaceutical glycosylation and leads on to how these will affect the ways that biopharmaceuticals are designed and manufactured.

16:05 – 16:25 Glycomonitoring using lectin arrays
Dr Andrew Sutcliffe, Procognia, Maidenhead
Glycosylation of biopharmaceuticals can change when any of the parameters in the production of the protein are changed. Procognia have developed a technology that will enable the user to get detailed information on glycosylation of the protein while it is still in its native state and still in fermentation media, all in a matter of hours. The data shown in the talk will show how the technology has been used in an industrial setting.

16:25 – 16:30 Validation of CE/LC/MS coupled methods for improved microheterogeneity discrimination of glycoproteins
P J Vickers, LGC, Teddington, Middlesex

16:30 – 16:50 Engineering glycosylation of recombinant proteins
Prof. Ben Davis, Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford UK

17:00 Chairman’s summing up & Open Discussion

Registration fees