CBE Colloquia - Unleashing Sugar Radicals to Engineer Small Molecules, Proteins, and Living Cells
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Carbohydrates and their glycoconjugates mediate a wide array of biological processes in living systems and play essential roles in pharmaceutical science. In nature, the installation of glycosyl units frequently alters molecular function. Despite their importance, access to structurally sophisticated and medically relevant glycosides remains limited due to the scarcity of efficient glycoengineering strategies and versatile glycosylation reagents. This challenge is further amplified in the context of proteins and living cells, where conventional small-molecule glycosylation strategies become ineffective under biorelevant conditions because of stringent requirements for aqueous compatibility, preservation of biogenic functional groups and native biological microenvironments.
In this talk, I will present glycosyl radical-based strategies developed during my PhD and postdoctoral training that enable the engineering of small molecules, proteins, and living cells. These approaches establish a general and biocompatible platform for glycoengineering across multiple levels of molecular and cellular complexity. In my future research, I aim to integrate expertise from carbohydrate chemistry, chemical biology, and polymer science to develop biochemically enabled living polymerization platforms for the chemical engineering of living systems, paving the way toward next-generation therapeutics.
Yi Jiang is currently an ETH fellowship-funded postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Lanzhou University in 2019 and subsequently pursued his PhD at the National University of Singapore, where he received the Best Graduate Award from the Department of Chemistry and the Best Graduate Thesis Gold Award from the Faculty of Science. Following his graduation in June 2023, he continued his academic training as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and the Rosalind Franklin Institute before relocating to ETH Zurich. His research interests lie at the interface of carbohydrate chemistry, chemical biology, and polymer science, with a particular focus on developing chemical and polymeric strategies to engineer small molecules, proteins and living cells. His work has been published in Nature, JACS, Chem, and ACIE, and has been highlighted by Nobel Laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, C&EN News, and other scientific media outlets.