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Sweet Dreams by Kathleen Cason
Intro
| Charting the course
| The team's beginnings
| The pitch |
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Intro
What started as a small idea between two friends
has grown into one of the most successful
research collaborations in the entire country.
On a fall day in 1983, Peter Albersheim and Alan Darvill met for afternoon tea at London’s
exquisite Goring Hotel. The scientists welcomed the quiet break from hectic days on a consulting
job.
Over warm scones and clotted cream, their conversation turned to their ongoing research back home at the University of Colorado.
They knew they were on to something — maybe something big.
Their research group had identified naturally occurring molecules that switched on an immune-like
response in plants. Could this lead to new, environmentally friendly pesticides? That seemed to be
an obvious possibility. But the discovery had much broader significance.
The molecular “on button” was a piece of complex carbohydrate. Unlike the carbohydrates in their
scones, complex carbohydrates are large molecules made of sugars joined together as strings and
complicated branches. It turned out that enzymes released in the heat of battle between plant and
microbe snipped off a molecule from the cell walls that acted like a plant hormone, chemically
alerting the plant to protect itself.
Signaling plant defenses was certainly an unexpected role for a carbohydrate and ran counter to
scientific knowledge of the day. Until fairly recently, most scientists believed that carbohydrates
only had two functions: to store energy (as starch in plants; as glycogen in animals) or provide
structure (in the form of cellulose, connective tissue or fluid in eyeballs).
The idea that chemical messages were encrypted in complex carbohydrates seemed nearly unthinkable
then. Some scientists even thought that Albersheim and Darvill’s results were anomalies. Little was
known about other roles for carbohydrates in biology because few scientists dared tackle the
subject, research methods were relatively primitive and the chemistry was difficult.
But Albersheim and Darvill trusted their findings. They predicted that similar carbohydrate
molecules might regulate other biological processes in plants. Heparin, which prevents blood
clotting, was one of the few known examples of a complex carbohydrate that controls a biological
event. So perhaps, they reasoned, complex carbohydrates also carried messages for animal cells.
In 1983, Albersheim and Darvill could not have foreseen that studying complex carbohydrates would
become one of biology’s hottest emerging research topics two decades later.
“I don’t know if Albersheim’s group was ahead of its time,” said Martha Krebs, former director of
the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. “But I do know that they were on the leading
edge of the discovery curve.”
Today, glycobiologists (“glyco-” means sugar) are deciphering the astonishing roles of
carbohydrates in plants, microbes, and humans and other animals. Cell-surface carbohydrates inhibit
or promote invading microbes, dictate the success of organ transplants and blood transfusions, and
determine whether a bacterium infects pigs but not humans. The roles of carbohydrates in human
health — from bacterial and viral infections to cancer, diabetes and autoimmune diseases — promise
to lead to new vaccines, diagnostics and medicines.
Albersheim and Darvill knew that unlocking secrets of these molecules was going to take equipment
and expertise that the pair did not have. So as the tea grew cold, the two talked about creating a
research center devoted to understanding complex carbohydrates in biology.
They would need a team of scientists from diverse disciplines, free from the artificial boundaries
that might pigeonhole researchers as chemists or botanists or cell biologists. The pair imagined
that melding ideas and approaches would lead to discoveries no single scientist could have
envisaged or would have been able to accomplish alone. Plus, a critical mass of carbohydrate
researchers assembled in one place would give them a competitive advantage for funding, especially
to purchase and operate expensive equipment out of reach for an individual scientist.
Albersheim and Darvill had considered creating such a center at the University of Colorado where
administrators’ enthusiasm was apparent but the financial backing wasn’t forthcoming.
So in the Goring Hotel’s elegantly appointed sitting room, the twosome decided the time had come
to devise a new plan. They knew they were on to something — maybe something big.
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Intro
| Charting the course
| The team's beginnings
| The pitch |
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Research
Communications, Office of the VP for Research, UGA
For comments or for information please e-mail the editor: jbp@ovpr.uga.edu To contact the webmaster please email: ovprweb@uga.edu
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