Chemical Probes for Studying Plant Arabinogalactan Proteins

有了这个奖项，化学部的生命过程化学项目资助布朗大学的Amit Basu博士提供新的工具来帮助理解植物细胞壁。植物和植物衍生产品提供食物，建筑材料和能源。植物细胞壁是碳水化合物聚合物的来源，所有这些都具有广泛的商业用途。尽管它们很重要，但这些生物聚合物如何在植物细胞壁中组装在一起的分子细节还没有得到很好的理解。如果科学家要设计和改造植物，使其具有特定的理想特性，例如增加耐旱性或抗拉强度，这种理解是一个先决条件。该项目提供了新的化学工具来帮助满足这一需求。研究生和本科生也正在接受各种化学，生物物理和植物生物学工具的培训，各种推广工作正在为当地学校（学生和教师）提供参与布朗大学研究的机会。植物细胞壁是许多复杂多糖的复杂组合，其在壁中的精确结构排列仍然不完全清楚。目前迫切需要新的工具来研究细胞壁多糖的结构和功能。该项目侧重于两种方法，为阿拉伯半乳聚糖蛋白（AGP）的研究工具包提供有用的补充。AGPs是一种蛋白多糖，参与植物的多种细胞和生理过程。从植物来源中鉴定和分离AGP的主要工具之一是Yariv试剂，一种三价糖缀合物，在与AGP络合时形成沉淀。这项工作提供了关于Yariv试剂如何与AGP相互作用的见解，并致力于开发可用于更好地理解AGP生物化学和生物学的新类似物。此外，这项工作是建立在一个新的反应，允许一步组装复杂的寡糖，只要五糖。将这种方法应用于AGP片段的合成将导致合成定义明确的AGP片段，其可用作探针以阐明AGP结构和功能。

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.