PhD defence: Sialic Acids, Sialyltransferases and How to Find Them: Isotopic and Affinity-Based Labelling Strategies with Chemical Probes

PLEASE NOTE: The candidate gives a layman's talk, therefore the livestream will start fifteen minutes earlier.

Imagine you are holding a piece of chalk, and as you go anywhere, you mark the trail, the items and people that you interact with. Subsequently with a special chalk detector – our eyes – these chalk marks would give away your journey and whereabouts.

The chemical biology tools discussed and developed in this thesis were aimed to do exactly this. More specifically, we aimed to track the whereabouts and activities of a special sugar known as sialic acid, and the biological machineries that process them, a.k.a. the enzymes. We use special molecular “chalk”, commonly referred to as a label, which makes our target identifiable by its distinct isotope pattern or fluorescence. The molecules incorporating the labels are known as probes. This thesis covered the synthesis of new sialic acid-based probes, and a new technique to label, identify and inactivate the enzymes that create sialic acids in bacteria.