Archive 24/8/24

Department of Biological Physical Chemistry, Instituto de Química Física Blas Cabrera, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain has reported about the recognition of hypermucoviscous Klebsiella pneumoniae clinical isolates by innate immune lectins of the Siglec and galectin families.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11324429/

Klebsiella pneumoniae is an opportunistic bacterium that frequently colonizes the nasopharynx and gastrointestinal tract and can also cause severe infections when invading other tissues, particularly in immunocompromised individuals.
There were striking differences in the recognition of those bacteria by sialic acid-, galactose- and mannose-specific lectins as shown below.

A group from Department of Biotechnology, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands has reported about extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) produced by bacteria used in biological wastewater treatment.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/epdf/10.1021/acsestwater.4c00247

Unlike DNA replication or protein translation, glycan biosynthesis is not directed by a preexisting templatemolecule. The production of glycans is decided by a few factors: the biosynthetic machinery, the available nucleotidesugars, and signals from the intracellular and extracellular environment.
Thus, the presence of glycans is dynamic and is influenced by both geneticand environmental factors. Therefore, under such conditions, it is tremendously challenging to study the glycan composition in EPS.

Typically, approaches for studying glycoproteins in environ-mental samples involve identifying individual glycan structuresand further characterizing the proteins with mass spectrometry.
On the other hands, lectin microarrays offer a high throughput examination of the glycans on the proteinsurfaces, enabling a broader screening of a possible proteinglycosylation pattern.
So, they concluded that combining both approaches can provide acomprehensive understanding of glycoproteins, bridging the gapbetween structural characterization and functional implications