OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Glycans, complex sugars covalently attached to proteins, play crucial roles in protein stability and function, participate in “self” recognition, and modulate protein-protein interactions. Unlike proteins, glycans typically do not form secondary structures and remain highly mobile, posing challenges for traditional structural biology techniques. This high mobility, coupled with glycan heterogeneity, complicates the elucidation of complete glycoprotein structures and hinders research on the role of glycans in protein function. Although computer simulations can help address these challenges, they often require millions of hours on specialized supercomputers, highlighting the need for approximate methods that can be integrated into protein-solving pipelines.
To overcome these obstacles, we developed a simplified, open-source method for rapidly predicting the span and shape of glycans with minimal computing power. Using this approach, we can accurately predict SARS-CoV-2 spike protein epitopes that are not shielded by glycans, as well as assess the impact of glycans on protein flexibility. We also demonstrate that this method can be integrated with structural biology methods and glycoproteomics pipelines, offering a comprehensive tool for glycoprotein analysis.
1. B Turoňová, M Sikora, C Schürmann, WJH Hagen, S Welsch et al., In situ structural analysis of SARS-CoV-2 spike reveals flexibility mediated by three hinges. Science, 370(6513) 2020
2. R Zhu, D Canena, M Sikora, M Klausberger, H Seferovic, et al., Force-tuned avidity of spike variant-ACE2 interactions viewed on the single-molecule level; Nat Comm, 13(7926) 2022
3. M Sikora, S von Bülow, FEC Blanc, M Gecht, R Covino, G Hummer. Computational epitope map of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. PLoS computational biology, 17(4) 2021
4. Tsai YX, Chang NE, Reuter K, Chang HT, Yang TJ, von Bülow S, Sehrawat V, Zerrouki N, Tuffery M, Gecht M, Grothaus IL, Colombi Ciacchi L, Wang YS, Hsu MF, Khoo KH, Hummer G, Hsu SD, Hanus C, Sikora M. Rapid simulation of glycoprotein structures by grafting and steric exclusion of glycan conformer libraries. Cell, 187(5):1296-1311.e26.
