Lara Mahal

Last updated
Lara K. Mahal
FS9A8018-Final.jpg
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater
Known forlectin microarrays in glycomics
miRNA regulation of glycosylation
unnatural carbohydrate incorporation
Children2
AwardsCERC in Glycomics (2019-)

Horace Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry (2017) NIH Director New Innovator Award (2008) Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2008) NSF CAREER Award (2007) Beckman Young Investigator (2004) Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow (2000) ACS Medicinal Chemistry Predoctoral Fellow (1998)

UC Regents Scholar (1993)

Contents

Scientific career
Institutions

Lara K. Mahal is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. [1] She is also a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. [2] She is notable both for her pioneering work establishing lectin microarrays as a new technology for glycomics, [3] [4] her work on miRNA regulation of glycosylation [5] [6] [7] [8] and her graduate work with Carolyn R. Bertozzi on unnatural carbohydrate incorporation. [9] Work in her laboratory focuses on understanding the role of carbohydrates in human health using systems- and chemical biology-based approaches [10]

Academia

Mahal received her B.A. in Chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995. As an undergraduate, she worked on organic free radical chemistry in the laboratory of Professor Rebecca Braslau. In 1995, Professor Mahal joined the newly formed laboratory of Professor Bertozzi at the University of California, Berkeley where she worked on the incorporation of unnatural functionalized sialic acid derivatives onto the surface of cells. For this landmark work, Professor Mahal was awarded and American Chemical Society Medicinal Chemistry Pre-doctoral Fellowship. After graduating in 2001, Professor Mahal did postdoctoral research on neuronal exocytosis in the laboratory of Professor Jim Rothman at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center. During this time Professor Mahal was a Jane Coffins Child Cancer Research Fellow.

In 2003, Mahal joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Tenured in 2009, she then joined the faculty of New York University as an Associate Professor of Chemistry in the Biomedical Chemistry Institute. She was promoted to Professor in 2016. In 2019, Mahal became the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics at the University of Alberta. [11] Beyond the CERC, Mahal has received several major awards, including the Beckman Young Investigators Award (2004), [12] an NSF Career Award (2007), the Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2008), the 2008 NIH Director's New Innovator Award [13] and the Horace S. Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry (2017). [14]

Related Research Articles

Glycomics is the comprehensive study of glycomes, including genetic, physiologic, pathologic, and other aspects. Glycomics "is the systematic study of all glycan structures of a given cell type or organism" and is a subset of glycobiology. The term glycomics is derived from the chemical prefix for sweetness or a sugar, "glyco-", and was formed to follow the omics naming convention established by genomics and proteomics.

Glycome

The glycome is the entire complement of sugars, whether free or present in more complex molecules, of an organism. An alternative definition is the entirety of carbohydrates in a cell. The glycome may in fact be one of the most complex entities in nature. "Glycomics, analogous to genomics and proteomics, is the systematic study of all glycan structures of a given cell type or organism" and is a subset of glycobiology.

Defined in the narrowest sense, glycobiology is the study of the structure, biosynthesis, and biology of saccharides that are widely distributed in nature. Sugars or saccharides are essential components of all living things and aspects of the various roles they play in biology are researched in various medical, biochemical and biotechnological fields.

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Robert G. Roeder

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Lubert Stryer American biochemist

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Carolyn R. Bertozzi American chemist (born 1966)

Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi is a prolific American chemist known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology. She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" for chemical reactions compatible with living systems. Her recent efforts include synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they impact diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19. At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and is the former Director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She received the MacArthur "genius" award at age 33. In 2010, she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize faculty award. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), the Institute of Medicine (2011), and the National Academy of Inventors (2013). In 2014, it was announced that Bertozzi would lead ACS Central Science, the American Chemical Society's first peer-reviewed open access journal, which offers all content free to the public. As an open lesbian in academia and science, Bertozzi has been a role model for students and colleagues.

CLEC4M Protein-coding gene in the species Homo sapiens

C-type lectin domain family 4 member M is a protein that in humans is encoded by the CLEC4M gene. CLEC4M has also been designated as CD299.

Richard D. Cummings is an American biochemist who is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. He also the Chief of the Division of Surgical Sciences within the Department of Surgery. He is the Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Glycoscience, Director of the National Center for Functional Glycomics, and also founder of the Glycomics Core at BIDMC. As of 2018 Cummings is also the Scientific Director of the Feihi Nutrition Laboratory at BIDMC. Before moving to BIDMC/HMS, Cummings was the William Patterson Timmie Professor and Chair of the Department of Biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia from 2006-2015. At Emory, Cummings was a founder in 2007 of the Emory Glycomics Center.

Thomas A. Steitz American biochemist

Thomas Arthur Steitz was an American biochemist, a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, best known for his pioneering work on the ribosome.

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A. Hari Reddi is a Distinguished Professor and holder of the Lawrence J. Ellison Endowed Chair in Musculoskeletal Molecular Biology at the University of California, Davis. He was previously the Virginia M. and William A. Percy Chair and Professor in Orthopaedic Surgery, Professor of Biological Chemistry, and Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Professor Reddi's research played an indispensable role in the identification, isolation and purification of bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) that are involved in bone formation and repair. The molecular mechanism of bone induction studied by Professor Reddi led to the conceptual advance in tissue engineering that morphogens/metabologens bound to an insoluble extracellular matrix scaffolding act in collaboration to stimulate stem cells to form cartilage and bone. The Reddi laboratory has also made important discoveries unraveling the role of the extracellular matrix in bone and cartilage tissue regeneration and repair.

James C. Paulson is an American biochemist and biologist known for his work in glycobiology.

Jürgen Brosius German molecular geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Jürgen Brosius in Saarbrücken) is a German molecular geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was a professor at the University of Münster where he is the director of the Institute of Experimental Pathology. Some of his scientific contributions involve the first genetic sequencing of a ribosomal RNA operon, the design of plasmids for studying gene expression, expression vectors for high-level production of recombinant proteins and RNA, RNA biology, RNomics as well as the significance of retroposition for plasticity and evolution of genomes, genes and gene modules including regulatory sequences or elements.

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Margaret-Ann Armour Canadian chemist

Margaret-Ann Armour was a Scottish-born Canadian chemist based at the University of Alberta. She is best known for her expertise in developing guidelines for hazardous lab waste disposal, and for being a vocal advocate for women in science. Armour founded the Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology (WISEST) program, and served as the first and only Associate Dean of Science for Diversity at the University of Alberta. Among her many honors, she was named a member of the Order of Canada (2006), a 3M Teaching Fellow (1996) and a Canada 150 ambassador (2017).

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Jessica R. Kramer is an American biomedical engineer working as an Assistant Professor of Bio-engineering and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah. Kramer’s research lab focuses on the synthesis and application of glycopolypeptides.

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References

  1. Chairs, Canada Excellence Research (2012-11-29). "Canada Excellence Research Chairs". www.cerc.gc.ca. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  2. "Faculty | Chemistry".
  3. Pilobello, K.T.; Slawek, D.; Mahal, L.K. A ratiometric lectin microarray approach to analysis of the dynamic mammalian glycome, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 2007, 104, 10534-10539.
  4. Krishnamoorthy L.; Mahal L.K. Glycomic analysis: an array of technologies. ACS Chem Biol. 2009, 4, 715-732.
  5. Agrawal, P.; Kurcon, T.; Pilobello, K.T.; Rakus, J.F.; Koppolu, S.; Liu, Z.; Batista, B.S.; Eng, W.S., Hsu, K.-L.; Liang, Y.; Mahal, L.K. Mapping posttranscriptional regulation of the human glycome uncovers microRNA defining the glycocode. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 2014, 111, 4338-43. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1321524111
  6. Kasper, B.T.; Koppolu, S.; Mahal, L.K. Insights into MiRNA Regulation of the Human Glycome. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 2014, 445, 774-9. doi: 10.1016/j.bbrc.2014.01.034.
  7. Kurcon, T.; Liu, Z.; Paradkar, A.V.; Vaiana, C.A.; Koppolu, S.; Agrawal, P.; Mahal, L.K. miRNA proxy approach reveals hidden functions of glycosylation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 2015, 112, 7327-32. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1502076112.
  8. Vaiana, C.A.; Kurcon, T.; Mahal, L.K. MicroRNA-424 Predicts a Role for β-1,4 Branched Glycosylation in Cell Cycle Progression. J. Biol. Chem., 2016, 291, 1529-37. doi: 10.1074/jbc.M115.672220.
  9. Mahal, L.K.; Yarema, K.J.; Bertozzi, C.R. Engineering Chemical Reactivity on Cell Surfaces Through Oligosaccharide Biosynthesis. Science 1997, 276, 1125-1128.
  10. "Home". glycocode.org.
  11. Edmonton, Contact Information University of Alberta Faculty of Science1-001 CCIS University of Alberta; Directory, Alberta Canada T6G 2E9 Map Main UAlberta Switchboard: 780-492-3111 Contact Us: Faculty of Science. "Sweet success: $20M in government funding brings new talent in sugar research to Canada and UAlberta". www.ualberta.ca. Retrieved 2020-09-09.{{cite web}}: |last2= has generic name (help)
  12. "Lara K. Mahal". Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. Retrieved 9 March 2017.
  13. "NIH Director's New Innovator Award". Archived from the original on 2009-01-13. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
  14. "Horace S. Isbell Awardees". Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry ACS CARB. Retrieved 1 August 2018.