Paper accepted: “The endothelial glycocalyx anchors von Willebrand factor fibers to the vascular endothelium”

Today, Teja Kalagara’s paper in collaboration with the dermatology group of Prof. Stefan Schneider and Dr. Christian Gorzelanny, both then at University of Heidelberg/Mannheim and now at University of Hamburg, has finally been accepted in the new open access journal of Blood, Blood Advances. This paper contains the main results of Teja’s doctoral thesis which she performed in the framework of the Indo-German International Research Training Group on Molecular and Cellular Glyco-Sciences MCGS, and which she successfully defended in 2015! Teja’s initial observation, in collaboration with our colleagues in Mannheim, was the binding of chitosan oligomers and polymers to the surface of endothelial cells lining blood vessels. She was able to show that this binding promotes the anchorage of von Willebrand factor, a huge, thread-like protein that is secreted as a globular protein to the surface of activated endothelial cells, e.g. upon wounding or inflammation, and is unfolded to form a thread through the shear forces of the blood stream. This protein acts like a fishing line to recruit e.g. blood cells to the site where they can support e.g. wound healing and pathogen defense. Assuming that chitosan may act as a substitute for endogenous polysaccharides of the cell surface glycocalyx, Christian’s team then identified heparan sulfate side-chains of the proteoglycan syndecan 1 as one of the molecules anchoring von Willebrand factor fibers to the endothelial cell surface. This has been a study long in the coming, and we are happy that it will now finally appear in a very good journal. With a little luck, Teja will also become a co-author soon on another paper in which we are taking up some of her results on chitosan oligomer produced by human chitotriosidase.