Plasmonic Glycan Arrays for Highly Sensitive Detection of Glycan-binding Proteins

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Project Summary Exploring the biological information content in glycans represents one of the current focuses of postgenomic research and technology development. Glycan-based high throughput assays (e.g. glycan microarrays) hold great promise for the rapid analysis of carbohydrate binding proteins (CBPs), elucidation of CBP biology, and the development of diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics for a number of diseases, including cancer and neurological disorders. As the field of glycobiology grows, the important roles that glycans and glycoproteins play in health are becoming increasingly recognized. However, the “state- of-the-art” glycan arrays have several instinct limitations including poor dynamic range, poor sensitivity, and inability to easily interrogate multiple glycan-protein interactions simultaneously in complex samples. Because protein–glycan interactions are typically of low affinity, and many CBPs and auto-anti-glycan antibodies in clinical samples are generally in the range of fg/mL to pg/mL, the detection sensitivity of current glycan arrays is unable to reach the clinical threshold of many CBPs and auto-anti-glycan antibody biomarkers, especially in the early stages of the diseases when their concentrations in clinical samples very low. The goal of this project is to applied nanotechnology to overcome the major limitations of poor sensitivity and dynamic ranges of current glycan microarrays. We aim to develop and commercialize multi-plasmonic resonant photon enhanced fluorescent (MPREF) glycan array for glycomic research. With this project, we expect to develop ready-to-use products of: 1) the MPREF system include the components of plasmonic substrate and plasmonic fluorophores which will be marketed as glycan array kit, 2) a validated model MPREF glycan array containing 50+ Glycosaminoglycans.