Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) awarded $675,667 to the University of California, Davis on July 1, 2026, under the Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859) to support a five-year research initiative through April 30, 2031. The award funds development of chemoenzymatic strategies for synthesizing glycans and glycoconjugates—complex carbohydrate molecules with significant biomedical applications. The research will advance innovative methods that combine chemical synthesis with enzyme-catalyzed reactions to produce biomedically important carbohydrates, including ganglio-series glycosphingolipids, sialosides, human milk oligosaccharides, and bacterial polysaccharides.

The research program addresses two primary objectives: developing chemoenzymatic methods for synthesizing complex bacterial surface glycans applicable to combating antimicrobial resistance, and establishing scalable synthetic platforms for producing O-GalNAc-glycopeptides and glycoproteins with therapeutic potential. Specific deliverables include expanded enzyme repertoires (aldolases, glycosyltransferases, and sugar nucleotide biosynthetic enzymes), novel accessible methods for scalable production of synthetically challenging bacterial glycans, and streamlined synthetic processes for carbohydrate synthesis. These research outputs will establish user-friendly synthetic strategies and technological platforms to enable broader access to complex glycans for functional exploration and therapeutic development.