Automated Solid-Phase Based Methodologies for the Synthesis of Glycosylated Biomolecules

Abstract

Glycosylation is the most common post-translational modification of proteins in living organisms and participates in several processes such as cell adhesion, signal transduction and immune responses. Glycans present on glycoproteins are associated with health and disease conditions and can be used as markers for diagnosis or as therapeutical agents. However, the main limitation that slows down the research on glycosylated biomolecules is the lack of homogeneous isoforms of glycoproteins. Thus, the need to have homogeneous materials has prompted the development of methods for synthesizing glycosylated proteins.

This work is aimed to develop strategies and methodologies for synthesizing glycosylated molecules. Two projects were executed to synthesize glycosylated amino acids of Trypanosoma cruzi and variants of the human glycoprotein CD59.