About BioF:GREAT
BioF:GREAT — Glycoscience Research, Education and Training — is an NSF-funded biofoundry based at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center of the University of Georgia. Its purpose is to democratize glycoscience: to make the reagents, instrumentation, computational tools and expertise needed to work with glycans available to any researcher, and to bring glycoscience into the classroom.
The award
The University of Georgia’s Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC) has received an $18 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance glycoscience accessibility and research. This funding will support the establishment of the BioFoundry: Glycomaterials Research, Education, and Analysis Training (GREAT), an initiative aiming to democratize the study and application of glycoscience.
What BioF:GREAT provides
Glycoanalytics
A user facility offering glycomics, glycoproteomics, monosaccharide and linkage analysis, glycolipid and sialic acid characterisation, and glycosylation site mapping.
Reagents
A catalogue of recombinant glycosyltransferases and nucleotide-sugar donors, plus a repository of expression constructs.
Computational tools
AI and machine-learning methods for glycoenzyme classification and function prediction, and software such as JAAG for glycan modelling.
Research collaboration
Collaborative internal and external projects, accessed through the user proposal route.
Training
Hands-on courses in glycobiology techniques, taught at the bench, and a visiting scholar programme.
Education
An education programme building glycoscience instruction from high school through graduate level, with its effectiveness tested by education research.
Why glycoscience
Glycans are found on the surface of every cell and on most secreted proteins, where they govern recognition, adhesion, signalling and stability. Despite that reach, they remain under-represented in biology curricula and difficult to work with experimentally: the reagents are hard to obtain, the analytical methods are specialised, and the instrumentation is concentrated in a small number of centres. BioF:GREAT exists to lower each of those barriers.
Who runs it
The initiative is led by a principal investigator and five co-principal investigators — see principal investigators — supported by senior personnel across analytical chemistry, structural biology, microbiology, computation and education research. External oversight is provided by the executive advisory committee.