Speaker: Ronald L. Schnaar, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Topic: Expanding the Molecular Horizon: Integrative Mass Spectrometry Strategies for Spatial Omics and Neurodegenerative Disease Research
Date: Monday, October 20, 2025
Time: 6:15 pm Dinner, 7:15 pm Presentation
Location: Shimadzu Scientific Instrument, Inc. Training Center 7100 Riverwood Drive, Columbia, MD 21046 (Directions) This will be an in-person meeting.
Dinner: Please RSVP to Sheng Feng (SFeng@som.umaryland.edu) by Friday, October 17 if you will be attending the dinner.
Abstract: Every living cell carries distinctive covalent groupings of sugars, glycans, carried on glycoproteins and glycolipids mainly on their cell surfaces. In humans glycans are composed primarily of just nine sugars in specific linkages and patterns biosynthesized by a family of ~215 glycosyltransferases, the expression and specificity of which limit and define the human glycome. In part, glycans are involved in molecular recognition and cell regulation via their engagement with complementary glycan binding proteins, also called lectins. Deciphering this “sugar code” has the potential to provide a more complete understanding of cell signaling regulation and furnish novel opportunities for therapeutic development. Mass spectrometry has played an outsized role in glycomics and in defining the glycan-protein interactome. This talk will explore these themes via a series of vignettes from our studies aimed at identifying endogenous glycans that drive human biology via glycan-protein interactions, including recent work that developed bifunctional glycan tools to capture and identify a subset of the glycan-protein interactome.
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