Jianglong Zhu
University of Toledo, OH·Chemistry
Bacteria that cause serious infections are becoming resistant to antibiotics, so preventing infections with vaccines is increasingly important. Many dangerous bacteria wrap themselves in coats of complex sugar chains, called capsular polysaccharides, that look very different from human sugars.
- Fields
Chemistry
Biochemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
carbohydrate chemistry
glycosylation
oligosaccharide synthesis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Develop a gold(I)-catalyzed glycosylation reaction that uses sugar donors bearing an N-1,1-dialkylpropargyl carbamate group to join sugar units efficiently.
- Develop a cesium-catalyzed anomeric O-alkylation that forms β-mannoside links, a hard-to-make sugar connection with a specific 3D orientation, with high stereoselectivity.
- Apply the new glycosylation methods to chemically synthesize antigenic repeating sugar units from the capsules of Salmonella strains, Bacillus anthracis and Bacillus stearothermophilus.
More about the research
These sugar coats help the bacteria invade the body, and they make good vaccine targets. Most vaccines of this kind are made by linking bacterial sugars to a carrier protein. However, sugars harvested by growing bacteria vary in length and quality. Making them by chemical synthesis can give pure, uniform material, but bacterial sugars contain unusual building blocks and hard-to-form links between sugar units.
Why it matters
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a growing threat to human health, and vaccines can reduce reliance on antibiotics. Reliable chemical routes to pure bacterial sugar antigens could support uniform, fully synthetic glycoconjugate vaccines against pathogens such as Salmonella and anthrax-causing Bacillus anthracis. The project's stated goal is vaccines against bacterial infections.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Matthew Griffin
University of California-Irvine, CA·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Develop high-throughput screens of glycome–receptorome interactions to find which host receptors recognize capsular and exopolysaccharides from commensal and probiotic gut microbes.
Brian Stoltz
California Institute of Technology, CA·Chemistry
Develop new stereoselective reactions that produce densely substituted, enantioenriched building blocks for synthesizing complex molecules.
Peter Andreana
University of Toledo, OH·Chemistry
Design and synthesize L-rhamnose (L-Rha) dimers, trimers, and oligomers, plus L-Rha linked to glucose or glucuronic acid, using microwave-assisted chemistry to obtain pure compounds in high yield.
The school
University of Toledo: 10 labs on PI Pages, $73M a year on research, 120 research doctorates a year.
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