Nicola Pohl, PhD
email: npohl@indiana.edu
phone: 812-855-0298
Title(s)
Professor and Joan & Marvin Carmack Chair
Indiana University
Office
Simon Hall 120A Indiana University 212 S. Hawthorne Drive Bloomington, IN 47405-7003
Information
Education
1991 B.A. degree from Harvard College
1997 Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
2000 NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University
Research interests: Glycans coat the surface of all cells and can elicit immune responses against pathogens, but identification and then production of specific carbohydrate structures are challenging. The Pohl research group is finding new ways to make and analyze sugars to dissect their important roles in plant, animal, and human biology and to design therapeutics. One major long-term goal is to rationally design therapeutic interventions such as vaccines based on a deeper knowledge of these carbohydrates. We do this through the development of human-friendly automation and readily reproducible chemistry. The lab has created the first automated solution-phase method to synthesize oligosaccharides using methodologies that we are applying to other biologically active molecules. More recently, we demonstrated the first automated method to make the carbohydrate building blocks needed to feed automated glycan synthesizers; access to these building blocks has been a major bottleneck in the creation of diverse glycan structures. In parallel, we have created the first methods to use mass spectrometry—a technique that uses very low sample volumes—to identify a range of carbohydrates that share molecular weights as a first step in designing a full process for de novo carbohydrate sequencing.