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Kuberan Balagurunathan

Professor of Medicinal Chemistry 

Glycobiology

Kuby Balagurunathan

 

Biological Chemistry Program

Education

B.S. St. Joseph's College, India

Ph.D. University of Iowa

 

 

Research

In the post-genomics era, it is now accepted that complex glycoconjugates such as proteoglycan regulate numerous patho-physiological processes in all living species. They carry enormous structural information in terms of sulfation, epimerization, domain organization, chain length, number of chains and type of chains along with their core proteins. Production of proteoglycans with such high complexity occurs in template-independent fashion seamlessly, yet our understanding of their biosynthesis, structures and functions is somewhat incomplete and imperfect. We are developing a wide variety of chemical biology tools to define the biosynthetic pathways of heparan sulfate and related glycosaminoglycans (GAG) such as chondroitin sulfate and dermatan sulfate. We synthesize heparin and heparan sulfate structures with a dozen recombinant enzymes to define the structural basis for the interactions of growth factors and Heparan sulfates and the subsequent biological actions. We recently found that a library of click-xylosides produce distinct GAG chains in cellular systems and proposed a GAGOSOME model for the dynamic regulation of combinatorial GAG biosynthesis. These molecular tools are currently used in the lab to define the snap shots of biosynthetic events and signaling events that are associated with development and diseases with a final goal to advance the study of heparanomics.

Kuby Balagurunathan's Figure

GAGOSOME MODEL

 

References

  1. Roy A, Miyai Y, Rossi A, Paraswar K, Desai UR, Saijoh Y, Kuberan B. "Metabolic engineering of non-pathogenic E. coli strains for the controlled production of low molecular weight heparosan and size-specific heparosan oligosaccharides" (2021) Biochim Biophys Acta Gen Subj.,1865(1):129765
  2. Tran DT, Zhang T, Stutsman R, Might M, Desai UR, Kuberan B. “anexVis: visual analytics framework for analysis of RNA expression.” (2018) Bioinformatics.,34, 2510-2512
  3. Mencio CP, My Tran V, Quintero MV, Koketsu M, Goller F, Kuberan B. “Regulation of glycosaminoglycan biogenesis is critical for sensitive-period-dependent vocal ontogeny.” (2017) Dev Neurobiol., 77, 1401-1412
  4. Kalita, S. Balivada, V. Swarup, C. Mencio, K. Raman, U. R. Desai, D. Troyer, B. Kuberan. “A Nanosensor for Ultransenstive Detection of Oversulfated Chondroitin Sulfate Contaminant in Heparin” (2014) Journal of the American Chemical Society, 136, 554-557
Last Updated: 7/14/21