Mass spectrometry of biologically active carbohydrates and their interactions with proteins
Prof. Dr. Jasna Peter-Katalinić, Dr. Michael Mormann
PhD projects to be supervised by the members of the biomedical analysis group should be designed for the area of structural analysis of complex biological samples. Such projects will comprise characterization of complex oligosaccharides such as biologically active chitosan oligo- and polymers or glycosaminoglycans and probing non-covalent interaction of lectins and glycoconjugates. Projects should be designed to be performed in the Biomedical Analysis lab at the University of Münster, but a part of each proposed project will be carried out in collaborating labs in India. Following tentative titles are proposed for PhD theses:
- Structural characterization of degree of polymerisation (DP), the degree of acetylation (DA), and the pattern of acetylation (PA) of chitosan oligomers and polymers by mass spectrometric techniques (together with B. Moerschbacher; synthesis of standards together with Balamurugan, Ramu Sridhar);
- Probing non-covalent interaction of modified chitin de-acetylases and sequence-specific chitosan hydrolases with oligosaccharide substrates. Characterization of substrate specificities, cleavage mechanisms, and product pattern characterisation by use of mass spectrometry (together with B. Moerschbacher, possibly together with Appa Rao);
- Chip mass spectrometry and integrated liquid chromatography chip MS glycoprofiling of oligosaccharides (with K. Grobe, D. Seidler and R. Sridhar, R. Balamurugan, M. Wild and S. Schneider);
- Characterization of oligosaccharide structural patterns by hyphenated capillary electrophoresis mass spectrometry (with K. Grobe, D. Seidler and R. Sridhar, R. Balamurugan, M. Wild and S. Schneider);
- Identification of carbohydrate components in complex biological systems as ligands for lectins and determination of their binding properties (possibly with M. Wild, A. Hensel, and M. Swamy, and Siva Kumar)
Beside the proposed topics, additional ones of similar type can be proposed by the candidates and are welcome!
