Engineered glycosylation

The clear long-term dream is to be able to generate an organism that can be used to cheaply glycosylate proteins for a variety of purposes. Such a system would have an impact on therapeutic proteins and antigens for things such as cancer and pathogens not to mention helping to provide insight into the many genetic diseases linked to glycosylation. Structural information will provide the key components necessary to begin engineering such a system. My hope is that we can ultimately build a molecular toolkit that will allow us to engineer a bacterium, such as E. coli, to cheaply perform this chemistry. Atomic detail can even allow us to generate novel GTs that could allow a bacterial protein to perform human GT chemistry.