Chemical Probes for Studying Plant Arabinogalactan Proteins

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With this award, the Chemistry of Life Processes Program in the Chemistry Division is funding Dr. Amit Basu from Brown University to provide new tools to aid in the understanding of plant cell walls. Plants and plant-derived products provide food, construction materials, and energy. The plant cell wall is a source of carbohydrate polymers all of which have broad commercial utility. Despite their importance, the molecular details of how these biopolymers are assembled together in the plant cell wall are not well understood. This understanding is a prerequisite if scientists are to design and engineer plants that are optimized for a specific desirable property e.g. increased drought tolerance or tensile strength. This project is providing new chemical tools to help address this need. Graduate and undergraduate students are also being trained in a variety of chemical, biophysical and plant biology tools and a variety of outreach efforts are providing local schools (students and teachers) with opportunities to engage in research at Brown.The plant cell wall is an intricate assembly of many complex polysaccharides whose precise structural arrangements in the wall remain incompletely understood. There is an urgent need for new tools for interrogating the structure and function of cell wall polysaccharides. This project is focusing on two approaches to provide useful additions to the toolkit for the study of arabinogalactan proteins (AGPs). AGPs are proteoglycans which have been implicated in a variety of cellular and physiological processes in plants. One of the main tools for identifying and isolating AGPs from plant-derived sources is the Yariv reagent a trivalent glycoconjugate that forms precipitates upon complexation to AGPs. This work is providing insights into how the Yariv reagent interacts with AGPs, and is working towards new analogs that can be used to better understanding AGP biochemistry and biology. Additionally, this work is building upon a new reaction that allows the one step assembly of complex oligosaccharides as long as pentasaccharides. Application of this approach to the synthesis of AGP fragments will result in the synthesis of well-defined AGP fragments that can be used as probes to elucidate AGP structure and function.