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Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting

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Poster Presentation during the event

Annual Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting

Our growing appreciation of glycoscience and the role of carbohydrates and glycoconjugates in various biological processes and biomedical applications is quickly changing our research fields. The complexity and fast-moving nature of the field make it necessary for glycoscientists to come together and share new developments in the field, as well as to help introduce researchers to the field who have come across questions of glycoscience in their research.

The Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting is dedicated to bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines across the Mid-South region and beyond to discuss issues in glycoscience, foster collaborations, and learn new techniques and technologies. Featuring research highlights from regional researchers, distinguished external speakers, and experts in the field, the event is designed to be an accessible venue for researchers and trainees to share their work, network, and foster collaborations. 

The meeting is sponsored by the Glycoscience Center of Research Excellence (GlyCORE), the only dedicated glycoscience research center in the Mid-South region. Established in 2020, GlyCORE seeks to support and foster glycoscience within the Mid-South region, providing specialized instrumentation and expertise to support both dedicated glycoscientists and biomedical researchers whose research happens to intersect with glycoscience. 

2024 Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting

Learn more about our 2024 meeting!

Keynote Speakers

Stephen G. Withers,  Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of British Columbia, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

 

Prof. Withers is an Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of British Columbia, where he was on faculty from 1982-2023 and is still running a research group. He obtained his BSc and PhD in chemistry with Michael Sinnott at the University of Bristol, UK, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Neil Madsen and Brian Sykes in the Biochemistry department at the University of Alberta doing heteronuclear protein NMR prior to his independent position. His research interests straddle the fields of organic chemistry and biochemistry, with a particular interest in the mechanisms of carbohydrate-active enzymes. These mechanistic insights have led to the development of methodologies for engineering of glycoside hydrolases into synthetic enzymes (glycosynthases), which are now used industrially for large-scale ganglioside synthesis as well as the development of potent inhibitors for several enzymes of therapeutic interest, including the influenza neuraminidase and human alpha-amylase. More recently, he has focused on the high-throughput discovery of enzymes for the removal of cell surface antigens. These are being used to convert A and B-type red blood cells to universal donor O-type as well as to modify human organs to universal O-type prior to transplant.
 

Tania Lupoli,  Assistant Professor of Chemistry, New York University Department of Chemistry, New York, NY.

Dr. Lupoli was born and raised in New York and graduated from NYU in 2005 as a chemistry major. After training in Chemistry/Chemical Biology and Microbiology departments, she returned to NYU Chemistry in the summer of 2018 to use interdisciplinary approaches to answer lingering questions in the field of infectious disease. She was selected as a 2023 Early Career Investigator by the International Chemical Biology Society. This highly selective honor tags recipients as “Rising Stars” in the field.

In her lab at New York University, Dr. Lupoli studies pathways that are important for the survival of bacterial pathogens under the stressful conditions they encounter inside and outside of the host. The lab is currently focusing on two main areas: (1) the synthesis and degradation of carbohydrate-based polymers on bacterial surfaces and (2) stress response mechanisms that allow bacteria to evade cell death. Using tools from biochemistry/chemical biology, chemistry, and microbiology (including sequencing-based approaches), they seek to discover the molecular players that modulate these pathways and design molecules that can mimic or inhibit their functions. With expertise in clinically relevant bacteria, like Mycobacterium tuberculosis, they can answer fundamental questions that pertain to human infection disease.

Gregory Hudalla, Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.

Dr. Hudalla is an Integra LifeSciences Term Professor and Graduate Coordinator. He was previously a National Institute of Health NRSA PPostdoctoralFellow at the University of Chicago. He earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and both his master’s degree and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Wisconsin.

Dr. Hudalla’s research creates functional biomaterials for therapeutic or diagnostic applications via molecular self-assembly. The Hudalla laboratory develops synthetic peptides that can assemble into a desired nano-scale architecture and then use these peptides as “tags” to organize biologically active molecules into functional nanomaterials. For example, their work has led to glycosylated nanofibers that inhibit the immunomodulatory activity of galectins, a family of carbohydrate-binding proteins. In another project, they combine enzymes and carbohydrate-binding proteins into catalytic nanomedicines that are anchored to tissues at an injection site via binding to extracellular carbohydrates. Hudalla’s long-term goals are to create biomaterials that can modulate immune responses for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and aberrant inflammation.

 

Melanie Higgins, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Melanie Higgins received her PhD in 2012 from the University of Victoria under the supervision of Dr. Alisdair Boraston, where she investigated glycan-degrading enzymes from Streptococcus pneumoniae. In 2013, she moved to the University of Adelaide as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow in Dr. James Paton’s lab, where she continued her research on pneumococcal pathogenesis. She then joined Dr. Kaity Ryan’s group at the University of British Columbia as an MSFHR PPostdoctoralFellow in 2015 to study the structure-function relationships and mechanisms of bacterial natural product biosynthetic enzymes. In 2021, she started her independent career at the University of Alabama, where she combined her glycobiology, structural biology, and natural product biosynthesis background to discover microbial enzymes with new activities, focusing on carbohydrate-active enzymes and natural product biosynthetic enzymes.

 

Robert Woods, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Chemistry, Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.

Dr. Woods received both his B.Sc.(Honors) in engineering chemistry in 1985 and his Ph.D. in 1990 in computational and synthetic organic chemistry from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He joined the CCRC in January 1995. Dr. Woods is a senior investigator on a technological research and development project of the National Institutes of Health Resource Center for Biomedical Complex Carbohydrates. He has been invited to write an entry on carbohydrate force fields for the Encyclopedia of Computational Chemistry. He is a member of UGA’s Campus Information Technology Forum and the UGA Modeling Laboratory Operations Committee and has made recent presentations at the International Carbohydrate Symposium, the Gordon Research Conferences, and the National Research Council of Canada. 

Dr. Woods’s research examines the relationships between the conformations of carbohydrate molecules and biological recognition and activity, particularly the mechanisms involved in carbohydrate recognition in immunological events. Significant alterations in the biological activities of peptides and proteins often accompany the covalent attachment of an oligosaccharide (glycosylation) to one or more of their amino acid residues. Approximately 60% of all mammalian proteins are glycosylated, and the glycoproteins that are generated by glycosylation are also frequently found attached to the cell surfaces of bacteria, fungi, and parasites.

2024 Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting Venue:

University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy, Thad Cochran Research Center

Oral presentations will be given in the Thad Cochran Research Center Auditorium, and posters will be displayed in the Atrium just outside of the Auditorium.

Oxford/University Lodging:

View the schedule here!

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, Prof. Josh Sharp, Prof. Samir Ross, the Investigators, and the Core Directors of the Glycoscience Center of Research Excellence, I look forward to welcoming you to the annual Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting at the University of Mississippi scheduled for Wednesday, July 10, 2024, in Oxford, Mississippi. This conference will be held with both in-person and virtual attendance options.

The Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting is intended to bring together glycoscientists from across the region to share their work, learn more about our broad and rapidly growing field, and start new ties and collaborations across disciplines. The Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting features research from investigators across our region, as well as bringing in exciting scientists from across the country to share their work and their insights. This meeting is hosted and sponsored by the Glycoscience Center of Research Excellence (GlyCORE), the region’s dedicated glycoscience research center. Established in 2020, GlyCORE houses staffed research cores with specialized instrumentation to support both our group of glycoscience investigators at the University of Mississippi as well as glycoscientists across the Mid-South region. 

The Organizing Committee intends for the Mid-South Glycoscience Meeting to be a collegial and welcoming event, both to support existing glycoscientists across the region as well as to serve as a useful introduction to the field for researchers and trainees. This year’s program will include researchers across many facets of glycoscience, from synthetic chemistry and glycomaterials to glycobiology. 

We hope you find this year’s program to be exciting, and we look forward to welcoming you in person or virtually to the Glycoscience Center of Research Excellence on the beautiful University of Mississippi campus.

Thomas Werfel

Chairman, Organizing CommitteeGlycoscience Center of Research Excellence (GlyCORE)