About the project
More than 60% of licensed therapeutic proteins are glycosylated. However, it is difficult to address glycan structure in standard structural biology workflows, leaving a blind spot in their understanding and design. This project addresses this gap directly, with applications spanning cancer therapeutics, suppressors of autoimmune disease, and anti-viral treatments.
You will join the Structural Biology Groups at the University of Southampton and at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble (ESRF France). Exploiting ESRF’s high-brilliance source for in-solution scattering at the BM29 BioSWAXS beamline, you will develop and validate an experimental and computational pipeline to resolve glycan conformation and occupancy directly from solution scattering data.
The work combines prediction of glycosylation states by computational techniques (GlycoShape, Re-Glyco) with experimental scoring. You will test the approach across four benchmark glycoprotein systems, including therapeutic antibody fragments, viral envelope immunogens, and IgG Fc glycoforms, each directly relevant to therapeutic development, biopharmaceutical quality control, or vaccine design.
At Southampton, you will learn protein production, purification, LC-MS/MS glycan profiling, and receive training in computational glycobiology. At the ESRF, you will join the BM29 BioSWAXS beamline team, learn small angle scattering data collection and analysis, beamline operation and model fitting. You will have the opportunity to engage with the international BM29 user community and explore synergies within the Macromolecular X-ray crystallography, Imaging and Scattering (MXIS) group at the ESRF (X-ray crystallography on ID23/ID30, USAXS on ID02).
The supervisor team are experts in Biochemistry and Structural Biology (Professor Ivo Tews, Southampton), prediction and modelling of glycosylation (Dr Elisa Fadda, Southampton) and integrative structural immunology (Dr Hayden Fisher, ESRF).
You will graduate with a rare combination of wet-lab biochemistry, computational modelling and large-scale facility experience, having tackled a genuinely unresolved problem in structural biology with clear relevance to both academic research and the biopharmaceutical sector.
Training
At Southampton, you will learn protein production, purification, LC-MS/MS glycan profiling, and receive training in computational glycobiology. At the ESRF, you will join the BM29 BioSWAXS beamline team, learn small angle scattering data collection and analysis, beamline operation and model fitting. You will have the opportunity to engage with the international BM29 user community and explore synergies within the Macromolecular X-ray crystallography, Imaging and Scattering (MXIS) group at the ESRF (X-ray crystallography on ID23/ID30, USAXS on ID02).
