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Surface patterning
Iowa State scientists, led by chemistry's Nicola Pohl, develop new
surface patterning method for the carbohydrate chip.
Although the application of microarray chip technology to the study
of carbohydrates is relatively new, it holds great promise for disease
detection and vaccine development in animals and humans.
A research team led by Nicola Pohl, assistant professor of chemistry,
has developed a new surface patterning method to make carbohydrate chips
for bioscreening.
"The success of DNA and protein microarrays in chip format for biosample
screening using small sample volumes has led to a variety of technologies
that diagnose many diseases," Pohl said. "Extending this concept
to other biomolecules has been challenging."
The new method developed by Pohl and graduate students Kwang-Seuk and
Firoz Jaipuri is based on a fluorous TeflonB.-pan like surface interacting
with fluorous-tagged compounds. Unlike most other molecules, these fluorous-tailed
sugars stick to the Teflon-type surface, which allows the tagged carbohydrates
to be immobilized in a microarray format on standard glass microscope
slides.
"The surprising part was that this fluorous interaction was strong
enough to allow standard bioassays on the chips without rinsing away the
sugars," Pohl said.
The Teflon-like tail also can be used to speed up the synthesis of complex
carbohydrates. The fluorous-based microarray method should rival the speed
and ease of solid-phase synthesis currently used for the commercial production
of DNA and peptides, Pohl said.
"It will allow a whole range of carbohydrate chips to be produced,
including chips that contain sugars of particular interest to plant scientists,"
said Pohl, a researcher associated with the Plant Sciences Institute.
The method should also work with other molecules, such as peptides, on
the same chip to screen for antibodies correlated with diseases such as
bacterial or fungal infections and diseases with known biomarkers (molecular
indicators) such as cancer. And the new chips can help screen new biocatalysts
that act on carbohydrates and discover new proteins, such as plant lectins,
that bind to specific carbohydrate sequences.
The researchers" initial work demonstrating the fluorous-based carbohydrate
chip method was published in the Sept. 2 online edition of the Journal
of the American Chemical Society. The research showed how two plant
proteins (from jack beans and a bushy plant) only bind to specific sugar
structures.
"The same principle can be used to screen for antibodies that bind
to certain sugar structures on pathogens to let us know that that person
or animal has come in contact with the pathogen and to let us know which
carbohydrates the person or animal generates an immune response against
in order to develop carbohydrate-based human and animal vaccines,"
Pohl said.
Teddi Barron
ISU News Service
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Nicola Pohl
Around LAS
October 31 to November 13, 2005
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