Penn Chemistry Professor Makes Inroads in Understanding Biomembranes

Glycans are cell membrane sugars which act like a telecommunications system, sending and receiving information, recognizing and responding to foreign molecules and neighboring cells. Last year the lab of P. Roy Vagelos Professor of Chemistry Virgil Percec was the first to find a way to model these mysterous but vital sugars. Now they have tested the new model in interactions with galectin-8, a cell signaling protein that, when mutated, may contribute to rheumatoid arthritis. By modifying a single building block in Gal-8’s structure, exactly as nature does in a portion of the population, the researchers dramatically impaired its ability to communicate with the artificial membrane, suggesting a possible molecular basis for the disease. Published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new study demonstrates how researchers can use this membrane model to examine the interactions of cell surfaces with other biological molecules, with far ranging applications in medicine, biochemistry, and biophysics.

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