White Team
The “White team” is involved in the synthesis of tailored bioactive oligosaccharides and glycomimetics through either chemical or enzymatic methods or using a combination of both. Conveniently, it utilizes a broad spectrum of knowledge from in silico molecular modelling, molecular biology, protein expression and purification, enzymology, nanomaterial science, glycobiology, and, primarily, carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry. The group keeps a large library of glycosidases (ca 200 items) and collection of production microorganisms, which are crucial asset for our activities. An important part represents rigorous analysis by LC-MS and advanced HPLC methods. The activities of prepared compounds, e.g., their affinity to lectins, inhibition of carbohydrate-active enzymes etc., are tested in house with recombinantly produced proteins by various methods including surface plasmon resonance, ELISA-type assays or specific assays in cell cultures.
Yellow Team
The Yellow team’s scientific interest is in (poly)phenols, flavonoids and flavonolignans – their chemistry, chemical and enzymatic modification, separation, characterization and biological activity. In recent years, the particular focus has been on 2,3-dehydroflavonolignans, hydnocarpins and various semi-synthetic derivatives of flavonoids, which are being investigated for their modulating effect on the multidrug resistance of bacteria and cancer cells. The metabolic fate of polyphenols in the human body is investigated using in-house prepared tentative metabolites (sulfates and glucuronides).
Blue Team
The focus of the “Blue team” are the enzymes of nitrile metabolism (nitrilases, aldoxime dehydratases) and tyrosinases and their biocatalytic exploitation. The general strategy consists in databases searches, heterologous gene expression, enzyme characterization and investigation of its potential for biotransformations of industrially important compounds or biodegradation of environmental pollutants.
Fundamental methodology pillars guaranteed by senior experts support the entire research in the group: molecular biology and GMO (Kotik), preparative HPLC (Biedermann), HPLC and LC-MS (Petrásková), microbiology and strain collection (Slámová), nanomaterial science (Bojarová). Solid infrastructure of the group, consisting i.a. of a modern instrumentation – HPLC (5 instruments and LC-MS), GLC (2×), protein chromatography (3× Äkta), spectrophotometers, shakers, molecular biology equipment, microscopes etc. – enables high quality research employing up-to-date methods.