Eric Sundberg
Emory University, GA·Biochemistry
Sugar molecules attached to proteins, called glycans, quietly control many processes in the body. On antibodies, a single glycan decides how strongly the antibody triggers inflammation.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
Biophysics
- Topics
glycobiology
IgG
antibody glycosylation
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Profile intact IgG antibody glycoforms in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid from Alzheimer's disease patients and matched healthy controls using WIgGWAM, an intact-protein liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry method.
- Further develop the WIgGWAM workflow to overcome remaining technical challenges, so it can measure symmetric and asymmetric glycans on both antibody Fc halves at full scale.
- Define the pathways gut bacteria use to degrade and import diverse glycans, and determine the structures and functions of key glycan-releasing enzymes and their partner glycan-capture proteins, using biochemical, biophysical and genetic methods.
- Test whether one gut bacterium expresses multiple enzymes with the same glycan specificity to survive distinct environments, and whether glycan-cutting enzymes have evolved into cell-surface glycan-binding proteins, using new mass spectrometry assays of deglycosylation specificity and kinetics.
- Define how Corynebacterial IgG-specific endoglycosidases, enzymes that clip the Asn297 sugar from antibodies, recognize both the glycan and protein parts of IgG at the atomic level.
- Engineer these Corynebacterial endoglycosidases to selectively act on subsets of IgG, such as particular glycoforms or autoantibodies, to advance them as therapies for antibody-mediated diseases.
More about the research
In the gut, glycans from food and from the gut lining are the main food source for resident bacteria. The lab's projects share a focus on these glycans and the proteins that build, read or cut them. They ask how glycans shape immune responses and microbial communities, and how that knowledge could be used to diagnose or treat disease. The work spans structural biology, enzyme engineering, mass spectrometry and patient samples.
Why it matters
Antibody-driven inflammation underlies autoimmune diseases and severe dengue and COVID-19 cases made worse by antibody-dependent enhancement. Engineered enzymes that strip the inflammatory sugar from only the harmful antibodies could become treatments that do not leave patients broadly immunocompromised. Antibody glycan profiles may also serve as biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease onset or severity. Understanding how gut bacteria compete for glycans could guide ways to reshape the microbiome, for example to favor helpful over disease-causing or antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alex Guseman
University of California-San Diego, CA·Biochemistry·Early-career
Define the thermodynamic and atomic-level structural basis of protein–glycan binding, explaining how a protein picks out one sugar structure from the heterogeneous mixture present on cells.
Joseph Zaia
Boston University, MA·Chemistry
Identify glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), long sulfated sugar chains, attached to specific brain matrisome proteins, using an Omnitrap mass spectrometry platform to analyze peptides carrying several sugar chains.
Daniel Petras
University of California-Riverside, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify hypoxia-sensitive microorganisms and oxygenase-dependent metabolic pathways by exposing marine microbial cultures to controlled oxygen levels and measuring gene transcription.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.