Graduate Teaching Assistant Ohio University Athens, Ohio
Body of Abstract: Glycosyltransferases (GTs) are carbohydrate-active enzymes responsible for the synthesis of all carbohydrates on Earth. The most abundant carbohydrates on Earth are associated with plant cell walls (CWs). It is estimated that up to 10% of plants genome are involved in the metabolism of plant CWs. GTs catalyze the transfer of sugars from activated nucleotide sugars to a nucleophilic glycosyl acceptor molecule. In most cases, these GTs perform their physiological functions as part of multi-protein complexes, where they form homo- and hetero-meres. Currently, protein-protein interactions (PPIs) between GTs and other proteins are not well studied due to lack of structural information and limited number of isolated/characterized multi-protein complexes. In addition,predicting PPIs between GTs is challenging and no bioinformatics tools are available to facilitate the identification of GT complexes.Thus,the main goal of this project is to develop a bioinformatics tool for PPIs between GTs (called GTome) and the creation of a database to host the findings. Our strategy consists of screening CAZy database to collect publicly available information on GTs for which 3D structures have been resolved.For GTs without 3D structure available, advanced molecular modeling and simulations to generate 3D structures will be applied to these GTs.This collection of structures will be used to map shallow binding clefts that would likely represent deep pockets involved in PPIs. The information will be used to create GTome tool.