Glycosylation in Health and Disease

The scientific contacts between Japan and the Netherlands have a long history. In 2000, serious attention was paid to 400 years of relation between our countries. A number of scientific activities were devoted to the existing relations and mutual influence. In that year for the first time a bilateral seminar on glycobiology was organized in Tokyo, Japan. Many fruitful scientific contacts resulted from this successful meeting. In 2005 a return meeting was held in Utrecht, The Netherlands giving rise to a boost of the interactions between research groups in both countries. Ever since then, the development of the field is internationally formidable. Glycomics, new developments in structure analyses, generation of glyco-probes and glyco-engineering are examples of a revolution in this area. In 2011, the 3rd meeting was held in Nagoya, Japan. Extensive discussions between Japanese and Dutch scientists took place on the role of genetic variation in the determination of glycosylation in health and disease, on the role of glycosylation in physiology and pathology as exemplified with animal models, on newly emerging technologies for high-throughput MS/MS-based structural determination and their use in disease biomarker discovery, and on innovations of organic synthesis of glycoconjugates. Extensive studies have since been done to get mechanistic evidence for the role of glycosylation in human health and diseases, through the analysis of patient materials as well as gene-modified or mutated organisms using more sophisticated glyco-proteomic analyses, together with bioinformatics. Those results will be discussed at the meeting that will be held in 2016. Through the focused discussion, we expect that translational applications of this new knowledge in clinical glycobiology, medicine and biotechnology will be opened up. It is relevant that in an intense bilateral seminar and round table discussions the ties between research groups are tightened and main challenges in the field are further defined, in order to improve on research at the cutting edge.