A sweet galactose transfer: metabolic oligosaccharide engineering as a tool to study glycans in plasmodium infection

© 2020 The Authors. Published by Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The introduction of chemical reporter groups into glycan structures through metabolic oligosaccharide engineering (MOE) followed by bio-orthogonal ligation is an important tool to study glycosylation. We show the incorporation of synthetic galactose derivatives that bear terminal alkene groups in hepatic cells, with and without infection by Plasmodium berghei parasites, the causative agent of malaria. Additionally, we demonstrated the contribution of GLUT1 to the transport of these galactose derivatives, and observed a consistent increase in the uptake of these compounds going from naïve to P. berghei-infected cells. Finally, we used MOE to study the interplay between Plasmodium parasites and their mosquito hosts, to reveal a possible transfer of galactose building blocks from the latter to the former. This strategy has the potential to provide new insights into Plasmodium glycobiology as well as for the identification and characterization of key glycan structures for further vaccine development. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 675671 (A.K. and G.J.L.B.). Funding from the Royal Society (URF\R\180019 to G.J.L.B.) and FCT Portugal (iFCT IF/00624/2015 to G.J.L.B.) is also acknowledged.