An exciting new discovery from researchers at Harvard Medical School has provided new insight into the possible cause of some autoimmune disorders. Autoimmune diseases are among the most common afflictions of humans, yet their root causes are not known.  Most arise spontaneously or sporadically in people without a clear genetic linkage or heritability.  Diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus are found primarily in women with an approximate 9:1 female:male ratio.  The laboratory of Richard D. Cummings, Ph.D. and Junwei Zeng, Ph.D. in the Department of Surgery at Beth...

Glycans, the complex sugars that stud cellular surfaces, are like a language that life uses to mediate vital interactions. Researchers are learning how to read their meaning.

Dr. Richard Cummings from the NCFG talks about the role of glycomolecules and the challenges in the field.

Read the full story at Quanta Magazine.

How many ways can the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is the cause of our current COVID-19 pandemic, interact with our cells and tissues? At the NCFG in the Department of Surgery at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, we have recently discovered that the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 has many attached carbohydrates (glycans) that can bind to a variety of carbohydrate-binding C-type lectin receptors (CLRs) that are on our macrophages, dendritic cells and other types of cells.  Furthermore, the amino acids carrying many of the attached carbohydrates were...

Everyone has heard of lymph nodes, the place where our white blood cells (lymphocytes) move into, out of, and around our bodies; and we all know that lymphocytes are important cells for immune health and for fighting disease.   But what do the lymphocytes need in order to do the moving around?  A breakthrough discovery in how lymphocytes migrate into lymph nodes is reported in a paper appearing in Nature Communications from the laboratory of Richard D. Cummings at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School; the first author on the paper is Junwei Zeng...

Recently we published in Cell Chemical Biology a method to produce glycopeptide libraries in small scale titled: "Parallel Glyco-SPOT Synthesis of Glycopeptide Libraries", The method utilizes a filter paper as the solid support to build a library of glycopeptides in parallel to produce microgram quantities of peptides. In this paper we show how we created two separate libraries of...