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Glycans at the frontiers of inflammation, autoimmunity and cancer

Published on May 30, 2024   36 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Immune System - Key Concepts and Questions

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Hello, my name is Salome Pinho. I'm the Group Leader of the Immunology, Cancer, and GlycoMedicine Research Group at the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health, University of Porto in Portugal. Today I'm going to talk about the relevance and the power of glycans at the frontiers of inflammation, autoimmunity, and cancer.
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What about glycans, and what are glycans in the context of glycobiology? Essentially, all of our cells are covered with this dense and complex coat of sugar chains that we call glycans, forming this beautiful layer of glycans of sugar chains that emerge in essentially all cell surfaces. These actually constitute the glycocalyx. Which is a major biological and physical interface with the micro-environment, such as with micro-organisms and also with the immune system, as I'm going to talk about today. As stated in this science paper, genome size cannot account for the complexity of an organism, and that's why the glycome compose and constitute a huge amount of important biological information that is added to the genome and the proteome. Essentially, this beautiful layer of glycans of sugar chains is because the majority of our proteins and lipids are modified with glycans in a process that is called glycosylation. We have a huge repertoire of different glycan structures that modify protein and lipids but we can also have glycans as free oligosaccharides such as the example of hyaluronic acid. Glycosylation is actually

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Glycans at the frontiers of inflammation, autoimmunity and cancer

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