Matthew Griffin
University of California-Irvine, CA·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
The trillions of microbes living in and on our bodies, known as the microbiota, differ greatly from person to person. Certain species have been linked to better outcomes in immune-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders and many cancers.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Chemistry
Biochemistry
- Topics
chemical glycobiology
glycans
polysaccharides
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Develop high-throughput screens of glycome–receptorome interactions to find which host receptors recognize capsular and exopolysaccharides from commensal and probiotic gut microbes.
- Generate libraries of homogeneous, multipurpose glycan probes to pinpoint the glycan motifs, cell types and gut regions involved in microbial glycan signaling to the host.
- Engineer new functionality into the microbial glycocalyx, the sugar coat on bacterial surfaces, to track and manipulate how microbial glycans interact with host tissues.
- Determine the molecular mechanism by which structurally disparate microbial polysaccharides act as ligands for a well-known pattern recognition receptor of the immune system.
More about the research
These links, however, are mostly correlations, and without knowing the mechanisms it is hard to turn them into medicines. This project focuses on one likely mechanism: the long sugar chains (polysaccharides, or glycans) that gut bacteria coat themselves with or release. These sugar chains are known to tune both fast, built-in immunity and slower, targeted immunity. They are very hard to study, though, because they vary enormously even between closely related microbes, and few general tools exist to analyze them.
Why it matters
Knowing exactly how gut microbes' sugar coatings signal to the immune system could better guide how probiotic and postbiotic therapies (microbe-derived products) are chosen and even prescribed for inflammatory diseases. The project's tools could also help researchers study polysaccharides from disease-causing bacteria and other organisms.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xin Li
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Determine how fungal stimulatory RNA (fsRNA), a newly identified fungal RNA, triggers innate immune responses in the intestine, using fungal genetic engineering and long-read RNA sequencing.
Jianglong Zhu
University of Toledo, OH·Chemistry
Develop a gold(I)-catalyzed glycosylation reaction that uses sugar donors bearing an N-1,1-dialkylpropargyl carbamate group to join sugar units efficiently.
Alex Guseman
University of California-San Diego, CA·Biochemistry·Early-career
Define the thermodynamic and atomic-level structural basis of protein–glycan binding, explaining how a protein picks out one sugar structure from the heterogeneous mixture present on cells.
The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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