Designer Glycans, live at PCWB2021

The Designer Glycans lab is represented by four members (Catalin, Annika, Bo, and Madalen) at the 7th International Conference on Plant Cell Wall Biology (PCWB2021). Originally scheduled to take place in Sapporo, Japan last year, this meeting is now in a digital format to accommodate a global audience from June 27 to July 1, 2021.

We are happy to see many international colleagues from the plant cell wall biology field and present our latest unpublished results in two posters (Bo and Annika) and one talk (Madalen) during this exciting meeting.

Annika presents our latest finding on the biodiversity of heteromannan-producing enzymes from across the plant kingdom.

To prioritize enzymes to be characterized in planta, Annika is leveraging the power of our yeast expression system for heteromannan production: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1814003116 and https://doi.org/10.3390/plants8110516

Madalen will talk about the modular engineering of cellulose-synthase like enzymes and the development of new carbohydrate-binding probes for non-invasive heteromannan detection.

Novel probes are required to monitor the dynamics of plant polysaccharides in a high-throughput. Limitations of current tools were discussed in this review: https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.17.01776

Bo present novel microtubule-related players that modulate of cellulose deposition around the surface of Arabidopsis seeds. This projects stems from a collaboration with Katharina Bürstenbinder at IPB Halle.

The new mutants are reminiscent of the published trm4 seed phenotypes, which Bo and Catalin previously worked on: https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.15442

We will look forward to many engaging discussions during PCWB2021.