A researcher at the University of Dundee is making important discoveries into how sugars in the body talk to one another. Dr Paul Crocker has been awarded a grant as part of a large-scale international consortium, to investigate how sugars on cells of the body mediate cell communication. The consortium will receive $36 million over a 5-year period from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), US. Most of the funding will go towards setting up several resource centres in the US which will provide reagents for the 45 participating laboratories around the world. Dr Crocker's group is the only one in the UK to receive funding within the consortium.
Carbohydrates, together with proteins and lipids, cover every cell in our bodies, and permit cells to both transmit and receive chemical, electrical and mechanical messages. Biologists are finding that even minor differences in sugar structures can have a huge impact on biological functions: in fact, sugars are involved in everything from embryonic development to regulation of the immune system. There is also a growing recognition that sugars are important in many diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer's and in infectious diseases like malaria and AIDS.
"We know enough to say that some sugars carry zip [post] code-like addresses to help cells know where to go in the body, but what we know is just the tip of the iceberg," said project leader, James Paulson of the Scripps Research Institute, USA. For years, the study of carbohydrates and their influence on cell communication has languished. One reason for this is that unlike proteins, which are produced for the most part from a single gene, carbohydrates are made by the concerted actions of many different genes. This results in every cell in our body assembling a great variety of complex carbohydrate molecules which are inevitably difficult to study. Ultimately, findings will improve the understanding of our immune system, since immune cells rely heavily on sugars for travelling through the blood to sites of inflammation and the lymph nodes, and for producing a normal immune response against foreign invaders.
Research in Dr Crocker's laboratory is focussed on a newly-discovered family of carbohydrate-binding proteins called Siglecs. These proteins are expressed on key cells of the immune system that form the first line of defence against invasion by potential pathogens. Interactions between carbohydrates and the Siglecs are thought to be important in the fine-tuning of our immune system. This allows it to mount an effective attack on the invading pathogens whilst leaving the cells of our own bodies unscathed.
Paul Crocker: "This is an exciting opportunity to work with a large number of top laboratories world-wide. It will provide essential resources and promote collaborations that would otherwise not exist. The hope is that funding of this type will greatly accelerate progress in our understanding of how carbohydrates mediate cell communication. In the future, this could lead to the development of new therapies for a variety of different diseases."/ENDS
For further information contact:
Dr Paul Crocker
Division of Cell Biology and Immunology
University of Dundee
Tel: 01382 345781