Current Research Profile

The Field group is diverse in its activities, which range from organic synthesis to mechanistic enzymology and chemical biology. The common theme that runs throughout is carbohydrates:

Martin Rejzek working with the freeze dryer

• the development of novel chemical and enzymatic approaches for the preparation of sugar nucleotides, oligosaccharides and glycosylated natural products
• target synthesis of plant cell wall oligosaccharides to enable biosynthesis and self-assembly studies
• structural and mechanistic studies on enzymes involved in lipopolysaccharide and secondary metabolite biosynthesis
• carbohydrate-coated surfaces ("glycochips", gold nanoparticles and fluorescent quantum dots) for identifying and quantifying protein-carbohydrate and pathogen-carbohydrate interactions
• chemical genomics and chemical proteomics tools for dissecting events in cell and developmental biology (cell migration in Xenopus laevis; root hair development in Arabidopsis thaliana; starch metabolism in barley seed germination).

 

Margherita Fais and Sergey Nepogodiev working on the HPLC