The University of Georgia Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC) is one of the world’s leading research organizations in its field. Over its nearly 40-year history, CCRC faculty have garnered many millions of dollars in research funding, not to mention a catalogue of scholarly publications and prestigious awards.
At the same time, despite its sterling scientific reputation, CCRC has been described as a “diamond in the rough” or an “undiscovered gem” at UGA. This is likely due at least in part to a limited public understanding of what exactly “complex carbohydrates” (also known as glycans) are in the first place.
All that may be about to change.
UGA has received a six-year, $18 million award from the National Science Foundation’s BioFoundries program to launch the BioFoundry: Glycoscience Resources, Education, And Training (BioFoundry: GREAT), an ambitious effort to increase awareness, interest, knowledge, and participation in carbohydrate science all the way from K-12 curricula to the most advanced research and development institutions on Earth.
“Glycans are one of the four major biomolecules of life, along with nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids,” said principal investigator Lance Wells, Distinguished Research Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator at CCRC. “But they are undertaught in the classroom and understudied at the bench. The big concept of the BioFoundry is to take the glycobiology research, education, and knowledge that is held in very few places in the world—one of them being at UGA—and democratize it to move the whole field forward.
“We want glycobiology to become part of what we think of when we think about life science,” Wells said, “both on the education and the research side.”
Three-part strategy
As its name implies, the BioFoundry will focus on three activities to spread the gospel of glycoscience: resources, education, and training, all to be made available to collaborators and clients through a dedicated user facility that will be based at CCRC. The first component—resources—capitalizes on the center’s world-renowned collection of research talent. The idea is to leverage CCRC’s research and technology development to provide better tools for new and aspiring glycoscientists to use in their work.
For example, enzymes are critical to the formation and structure of glycans. Kelley Moremen has spent decades studying the biochemistry, structure, and regulation of enzymes involved in the creation of glycoproteins. One of the resources BioFoundry will make available are those very enzymes.
“We’ve focused historically on mammalian enzymes,” said Moremen, Distinguished Research Professor at CCRC, “but now with the BioFoundry, we have a mandate to expand that to an all-species space, from bacteria to plants to microbes—basically all of biology—to understand the enzymes involved in glycan production, how they work, and what are the types of structures they make.”
Moremen, Wells, and CCRC Assistant Professor Breeanna Urbanowicz also will work with Professor Natarajan Kannan, Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, to create computational resources that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to exponentially expand what is possible in carbohydrate research. Kannan is a member of the UGA Institute of Bioinformatics, and both he and Urbanowicz have appointments in the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Teaching glycoscientists to fish
Glycans are a basic building block of life, and the surfaces of all biological cells have a complex and diverse coating of glycans that greatly influence interaction and communication with other cells.
But the applications of glycobiology go far beyond the medical life sciences. Multiple CCRC researchers study the role of carbohydrates in the production of biofuels and have leadership roles in organizations like the Center for Bioenergy Innovation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Others study how glycans are involved in the production of plant-based new materials.
Researchers working in these areas and more will be welcomed at the BioFoundry user facility, which is intended to be a full-service operation. CCRC’s Analytical Services & Training (AST-CCRC) unit, one of UGA’s core research facilities, provides instrumentation services and hands-on training for clients around the world. Parastoo Azadi, executive technical director of AST-CCRC, will also oversee the BioFoundry user facility.
Just like AST-CCRC, that user facility will be happy to perform analyses and instrumentation work for BioFoundry clients—free of charge, provided their goals align with the project’s mission—but the emphasis will be on giving clients the training and tools to do the work themselves.
“Through this facility, we’re going to interact with scientists in different disciplinary areas,” Azadi said. “Whether they’re in the plant area, bacteria and microbial area, mammalian proteins, and whether they are interested in industrial applications, medical applications, production of biofuels or new materials—all of these people can come to this hub and get what they need.
“We will create training and education programs for them so they can do this themselves. That’s a major component—we want them to do it themselves.”
Not only does the NSF award allow potential clients to have their analytic work done at a greatly reduced price or even for free, it even provides funding to bring clients to Athens for short training residences.
“We’ve been doing training at CCRC for a long time, but the reality is we have a lot of really high-end instrumentation,” Wells said. “If you’re not from a big research school, you come here, you get trained, and then you go back to your university but you don’t have a 900 MHz NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) machine.
“One of the things we’re doing with the training aspect,” he said, “is actually bringing people in longer term and allowing them to do their project here with our cutting-edge instrumentation.”
“We want glycobiology to become part of what we think of when we think about life science, both on the education and the research side.”
– Lance Wells, Principal Investigator, Distinguished Research Professor, and Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator at CCRC
Playing the long game
Perhaps most important for glycoscience in the long term is the BioFoundry’s third major component: education.
“Most people, when they think of carbohydrates, think of sugar icing on donuts, or how you nutritionally bring in carbs and convert them into energy,” Moremen said. “That certainly is part of the role of carbohydrates in biological systems, but most people are completely naïve to the massive collection of other carbohydrate functions. Eventually, carbohydrate science needs to be inserted into teaching modules at all levels.”
That’s where co-investigator Erin Dolan comes in. Dolan, Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Innovative Science Education in Franklin College, focuses her research on student learning, development, and success. She will lead an effort to develop educational experiences that promote the BioFoundry’s mission, such as glycoscience modules for existing chemistry or biology courses, standalone courses for undergraduate and graduate students, and hands-on summer courses for beginners.
“The fact that we entirely neglect the sugar chains that influence the functions of all the other biological components is deeply problematic,” Dolan said. “When you’re talking about glycoscience research, you’re talking about the next generation of scientists. How do we build capacity in that scientific community? You have to think about humans, and that’s the perspective I bring to this: I study humans.”
Dolan’s work initially will focus on raising the visibility of glycoscience in undergraduate and graduate education to a level comparable to the other elements of biology. But she is also playing the long game of influencing K-12 curricula by trying to make carbohydrate science a foundational aspect not just of science education, but in the education of science educators.
“I don’t think any of us envision going into high school classes and taking over curriculum,” Dolan said. “But think about where teachers take their science coursework: They take it as undergrads, right here at UGA or across the country at their undergraduate institutions. If we can make sure that future teachers have access to this information, that allows us to have an impact on high school education much bigger than simply focusing on classrooms in Athens.”
“If we listen to others in our field, including our key personnel associated with the BioFoundry ” Wells said, “if we provide resources to the laboratories through research and technology development, if we provide education materials at all levels, if we work closely with industry to provide new tools, if we provide better and more thorough training, and if we bring it all together, we’re going to have some exciting discoveries that will lead to commercial applications in bioengineering, biomaterials, biomedicine and bioenergy, as well as increasing knowledge of glycans in classrooms and research labs across the globe.”
