Clinical & Translational Glycoscience Research Center

The mission of the Clinical Translational Glycoscience Research Center (CTGRC) at Georgetown University is to facilitate translational glycoscience studies in biomedical research. Our goal is to understand the function of glycoproteins and to enable their quantitative analysis in the context of the pathophysiology of human diseases. To this end, we develop analytical methods for mass spectrometric characterization of glycoproteins, informatics tools for the glycoproteomics data interpretation, and model systems for the studies of glycoproteins at the level of the molecule, cell, and organism. We want to understand how glycosylation pathways integrate with other biomolecules to adjust the flow of information in biological systems. We therefore develop methods for reliable quantitative analysis of the glycoconjugates and apply these techniques to collaborative studies aimed to advance biomedical research.

The CTGRC at Georgetown University started as a fusion of efforts at the Goldman and Edwards laboratories, that is fusion of analytical glycoscience and protein biochemistry (Goldman lab) and informatics of proteins and their glycosylation (Edwards lab). The joint research effort led to the development of glycoproteomics methods that are now applied to translational biomedical studies in collaboration with a growing number of research groups.