EAPSI: Development of a Powerful Protein Analysis Toolbox to Study Carbohydrate and Protein Interactions

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Carbohydrate and protein interactions play important roles in biological events. This project will study functionalities of different types of the enzyme alpha-L-fucosidase, which interact with carbohydrate molecules containing L-fucose. L-fucose is naturally abundant, and found in human milk oligosaccharides. In humans, deficiency of alpha-L-fucosidase can give rise to a rare autosomal recessive disorder called fucosidosis, and clinical findings indicate that abnormal levels of it can be potentially associated with other rare diseases. This project will investigate alpha-L-fucosidase activities by using multiple carbohydrate structures as probes. The results from this project will provide insights about the structure-activity relationship between alpha-L-fucosidases and different types of carbohydrate molecules. This toolbox will be further beneficial to characterizing newly discovered alpha-L-fucosidases. This research work will be done with Professor Chun-Hung Lin, a distinguished scientist in the field of carbohydrate chemistry, at Academia Sinica Research Institute of Taiwan. Professor Lin's group has done extensive research work to study alpha-L-fucosidases and this collaboration is an invaluable opportunity to learn further aspects of this research area. This project will develop a toolbox of molecular probes to study alpha-L-fucosidase catalytic activities. Alpha-L-fucosidase is an important protein that can cleave L-fucose, an abundant sugar molecule, from carbohydrate structures. The L-fucose linkages may vary from one carbohydrate structure to another. Deficiency or abnormal levels of alpha-L-fucosidase is related to several medical conditions including fucosidosis, carcinoma of the stomach, and cystic fibrosis etc. However, the roles of alpha-L-fucosidases are not well understood. Under the plan for this project, alpha-L-fucosidases from collaborator's group will be tested with the molecular probes which will allow to study catalytic function(s) of the proteins. Additionally, discovery of alpha-L-fucosidases that are catalytically active toward one specific type of L-fucose linkage will be useful as it can be used as a tool to analyze complex carbohydrate structures.This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan.