GlycoNet Integrated Services Facility

About the Facility

The facility is situated on the traditional territories of diverse Indigenous peoples including the Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibway/ Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Inuit, Kanien’kehà:ka, Huron-Wendat, Seneca, Haudenosaunee, Anishanaabe, and the Coast Salish peoples, including the Tsleil-Waututh, Kwikwetlem, Squamish, and Musqueam Nations. We acknowledge those who came before us and honours those whose histories, languages, and cultures continue to influence and enhance our vibrant community.

The facility operates as fully integrated national platform with nodes covering Montreal (Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, CHU Ste-Justine), Toronto (Hospital for Sick Children), Hamilton (McMaster University), Edmonton (University of Alberta), and Burnaby (Simon Fraser University). GIS represents a critical element of Canada’s biotechnology capacity, and has the expertise, technologies, and infrastructure to help realize Canada’s One Health and SDG objectives, including bio-innovation and biomanufacturing for health, agriculture, ocean, environment, and many other areas of interest to Canadians.

Our Services

Our facility nodes are underpinned by world-leading glycomics experts. Together, these nodes deploy emerging technologies, integrate new protocols, and create new tools to provide state-of-the-art glycomics tools to tackle important academic and industrial problems. We drive innovations that will ultimately provide “Made-in-Canada” solutions to critical challenges in healthcare, agriculture and environmental sustainability.

Here at the facility, our comprehensive glycomics services include high-throughput glycan screening, glycan profiling and analysis, glycan-ligand discovery, custom carbohydrate synthesis, molecular glycobiology, glycoengineering, pre-clinical animal glycomics disease modeling, as well as microbial glycome analysis.

Our services, instruments, technologies and professional services are available to all researchers, from Canada and abroad, across academic, private, and government sectors. The facility’s scientific and technical personnel provides high-quality, high-throughput, and competitively priced products and services to all of its clients.

Please check our detailed services on Equipment and Services.

Our Expertise

Our facility promotes knowledge mobilization and technology transfer through a diverse team at seven regional centres, each of which has a strong track record in method and technology development.  Examples of these platforms include:

• Glycoengineered therapeutic proteins (Du et al., 2019, Cell Chemical Biology)
• Liquid glycan array (Sojitra et al., 2021, Nature Chemical Biology)
• Complex glycan synthesis (Lin et al., 2020, Organic Letters)
• High-throughput antibiotics discovery (Klobucar et al., 2021, ACS Chemical Biology)
• Tandem metabolic engineering (Zhu et al., 2020, Journal of American Chemical Society)
• Quantitative mass spectrometry-coupled binding assays (Bolivar et al., 2021, Analytical Chemistry)
• Lectin microarray (Heindel et al., 2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).

The economic sectors serviced by our facility extend far beyond biomedical research and biotechnology. Our unique service portfolio will also drive academic and market place innovation in agriculture, plant biotechnology, biomaterials, environment, biofuels, disease surveillance, clinical management, and many others.