Fundamental principles of protein O-GlcNAcylation

Proteins are the molecular machines that carry out all processes in the cells of living organisms. To allow multicellular organisms, such as animals, to develop from a single fertilised egg to birth, proteins need to rapidly respond to signals from neighbouring cells. This is achieved by small chemical modifications of proteins that act as on/off switches. My lab works on one such switch, a sugar called O-GlcNAc, that is absolutely essential for the development of animal embryos, for reasons that are not clear. Using the Villum Investigator grant my team will investigate which proteins carry this O-GlcNAc switch and how that changes their activity, how this leads to changes in communication between cells in a developing embryo, and how proteins are selected to carry this modification.