Antibody glycosylation in bacteria
In my research, I engineer bacteria as tiny biofactories capable of producing complex therapeutic proteins. By introducing synthetic glycosylation pathways, I enable these microbes to assemble functional glycoproteins. This work represents the first demonstration of full-length antibody glycosylation in bacteria and opens new opportunities for scalable, cost-effective biomanufacturing of life-saving medicines.
Belen Sotomayor, Thomas C. Donahue, Sai Pooja Mahajan, May N. Taw, Sophia W.Hulbert, Erik J. Bidstrup, D. Natasha Owitipana, Alexandra Pang, Xu Yang, Souvik Ghosal, Christopher A. Alabi1, Parastoo Azadi, Jeffrey J. Gray, Michael C. Jewett, Lai-Xi Wang and Matthew P. DeLisa “Discovery of a single-subunit oligosaccharyltransferase that enables glycosylation of full-length IgG antibodies in Escherichia coli”. Nature Communications. (2025) (Accepted)