Daniel Bojar awarded an ERC Starting Grant to map glycans

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Branco Weiss Fellow Daniel Bojar a Starting Grant of approximately 1.5 million Euro over five years. Dr. Bojar applied to the ERC to map nuclear glycans as a new class of molecules. In his project he aims to reveal how these new sugars are formed and transported into the nucleus, as well as to understand the role they play in health and disease.

Glycans are a type of carbohydrate often described as ‘the dark matter of biology’ because they are very diverse, dynamic and yet still poorly understood. They play an important role in everything from the selection of which sperm cell fuses with the egg cell to how active our immune system is and how likely we are to get sick. Daniel Bojar has discovered that the structure of glycans changes in the event of illness, and his research has focused on identifying diseases by using glycans as biomarkers.

The mapping will be done using mass spectrometry on the glycans in the cell nucleus. The data will be analysed using AI models developed by Daniel Bojar’s research group to handle large amounts of data in a short time. New methods will also be developed to explore this still unknown area of cell structure.

“Receiving an ERC Starting Grant for this project is fantastic. Without it, the project would not have been possible, as it requires significant resources to develop this new subfield of nuclear glycobiology,” says Daniel Bojar.

Read the news on the University of Gothenburg’s website

See the ERC website