Grant Funding


  • Alimentary Glycoscience

    Science Foundation Ireland has recently funded a consortium of researchers to explore the role of gut glycosylation in host-microbe interactions. The Alimentary Glycoscience Research Cluster (AGRC) will study the glycomic responses of gut cells to pathogenic and probiotic microorganisms and milk oligosaccharides using existing tools for glycoanalysis, lectin analysis, and transcriptomics, develop innovative, high throughput analytical platforms, and develop analogues and mimics of host glycans involved in these interactions. The Cluster includes researchers in the National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway), National Institute of Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT), University College Dublin (UCD), University College Cork (UCC) and Teagasc, as well as international collaborators and Irish and international industrial partners. This coordinated effort will build technological capacity and commercial opportunities in an area of high scientific and commercial potential, particularly in the biopharmaceutical, bioanalytical, dairy and food sectors.

    Read More at AGRC site »

  • Reproductive Biology Research Cluster

    The Reproductive Research cluster comprises a group of highly motivated, internationally recognized scientists from UCD and Teagasc whose research interests focus on fertility in domestic animals using cutting edge technologies, established animal models, in vitro tissue culture and bioinformatic tools for the analysis of reproductive tissues (follicles, oocytes, embryos, uterus).

    The Cluster has recently been awarded a multi-million Euro grant from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to address specific aspects of female infertility focusing on events in the days immediately before and after fertilization. The overall objective is to identify genes, proteins and other complex molecules, and their expression patterns, in bovine ovarian follicles, oocytes, embryos, cervix and uterus that are responsible for, or are markers of, infertility. Particular focus will be on those molecules that are responsible for failure of the initiation and establishment of pregnancy in the days following fertilization. The knowledge generated will provide opportunities to develop new diagnostics and therapeutics to improve reproductive efficiency in cattle, in the short term, and other mammalian species in the longer term.

    Read More at UCD news »

  • EuroGlycoArrays

    The EuroGlycoArrays project, launched on 01 September 2008, has been granted a 4 million EURO award by the EC to set up a Marie Curie Initial Training Network as part of the FP7 People Programme. This grant will fund four years of research and training into the development of carbohydrate arrays as highly innovative tools to map out carbohydrate-protein interactions in cells or tissues. The large-scale project is being coordinated by the University of Manchester, UK, and will be delivered by a consortium of 16 industrial and academic partners.

    Read More at EuroGlycoArrays site »

  • Developing minimally invasive, tools and technologies for high throughput, low cost molecular assays for the early diagnosis of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders (SCHIZDX)

    Schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder are a major burden to affected individuals and their families and to society at large. These two severe mental illnesses affect at least 2% of the population worldwide, and whilst 50% of sufferers do not receive adequate treatment, they cost hundreds of billions in healthcare provision, treatments and lost earnings. The current diagnosis of schizophrenia (and bipolar disorder etc.) is rather subjective, not only because of the complex spectrum of symptoms and their similarity to other mental disorders, but also due to the lack of empirical disease markers. This result in long delays (up to 1-3 years) before appropriate therapeutics is prescribed to first episode schizophrenics.

    Early treatment is associated with greatly improved patient outcomes. There is therefore a major unmet clinical need for empirical diagnostic tests for high throughput screening of biological fluids that would enable early and accurate diagnosis of schizophrenia and related disorders. The identification of specific biomarkers for mental disorders would revolutionize the clinical management of affected individuals. Biomarkers will help in the identification of disease sub-types, aid in predicting and monitoring treatment response and compliance, and identify novel drug targets. If such biomarkers can be found in readily accessible body fluids they open up the possibility of developing new early or pre-symptomatic diagnostics and/or treatments to improve outcomes or even prevent disease. The objective of our project is to identify biomarkers of disease and develop a diagnostic assay panel/tool for the high throughput screening of biological samples for clinical research. Moreover this platform will be utilized by SMEs for drug design and development for mental disorders research into new animal models for mental disorders and identifying biomarkers for other mental disorders.

    Read More at EU site »

  • Glyfdis

    Glycans in Body Fluids - Potential for Disease Diagnostics. GLYFDIS Research focuses on the potencial use of Glycans in body fluids for the diagnosis of disease. The Project (EC Ref. 37661) is funded and supported by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Program (FP6) -Life Sciences, Genomics and Biotechnology for Health thematic priority . The site contains a Project Summary, Project´s objectives, an overview of the partners that are involved in the research and news that will be continuously updated. For any comments or questions please contact the various partners directly, who will be happy to assist.

    Read More at Glyfdis site »

  • Glycosylation changes in cancer: a new class of biomarkers for breast and lung cancer (Irish Cancer Society)

    Glycoproteins consist of mixtures of glycosylated varients (glycoforms). Glycan processing pathways are tissue specific and reflect the environment both within and outside the cell. Altered glycosylation provides a strong focus for cancer biomarker discovery since disturbed glycosylation pathways in tumour cells give rise to aberrant glycosylation of both secreted and cell surface proteins. Using our in-house HT glycan sequencing technology we aim to identify, segregate and quantify potential glycan biomarkers from the serum of breast and lung cancer patients.

    Read More »

  • EUROCarbDB

    The EUROCarbDB design study aims to create the foundations for databases and bioinformatics tools in the realm of glycobiology and glycomics, and will establish mainly the technical framework for bottom to top initiative where all interested research groups can feed in their primary data. The new infrastructure will constitute the nucleus for the creation of a depository for carbohydrate related data similar to the extensively used data collections in the area of genomics and proteomics. The EUROCarbDB study concentrates on the evaluation and development of the basic requirements for the proposed infrastructure. It consists of four thematic tasks that include feasibility studies as well as essential preparatory steps for the establishment of EUROCarbDB.

    Read More at EUROCarbDB site » or visit internal EUROCarbDB instance

  • STINT

    The UniCarb-DB is a glycomics initiative to provide a platform for structural and analytical data storage and analysis. The development of UniCarb-DB was initiated between several research groups from University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Biomolecular Frontiers Research Centre (Australia), the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (Ireland) and Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics (Switzerland). The UniCarb-DB is currently focussing on the storage of and structural assignment based on mass-spectrometric data of carbohydrate structures.

    Read More at UniCarb-DB site »