Publications by authors named "Samantha L Fossa"
Article Synopsis
- - The study focuses on zwitterions phosphorylcholine (PC) and phosphoethanolamine (PE), which are commonly attached to sugars in biological structures like polysaccharides and glycoconjugates, playing a role in how certain parasites evade host immunity by modifying N-glycans and glycosphingolipids.
- - Researchers used functional metagenomic screening to find a novel bacterial enzyme, GlcNAc-PDase, that specifically removes PC from the sugar N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc-6-PC), showing strong substrate preference and limited activity on other modified sugars.
- - GlcNAc-PDase is classified in a new subfamily of the
It has been predicted that 30 to 80% of archaeal genomes remain annotated as hypothetical proteins with no assigned gene function. Further, many archaeal organisms are difficult to grow or are unculturable. To overcome these technical and experimental hurdles, we developed a high-throughput functional genomics screen that utilizes capillary electrophoresis (CE) to identify nucleic acid modifying enzymes based on activity rather than sequence homology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Sulfate modification of N-glycans is important for several biological functions such as clearance of pituitary hormones or immunoregulation. Yet, the prevalence of this N-glycan modification and its functions remain largely unexplored. Characterization of N-glycans bearing sulfate modifications is hampered in part by a lack of enzymes that enable site-specific detection of N-glycan sulfation.
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