Kazuhiro Aoki, PhD

“Mass spectrometry-based glycomics: Finding a needle in a haystack”

Dr. Kazuhiro Aoki, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at the University of Georgia. He has more than 15 years of experience in glycometabolomics using a wide variety of analytical techniques to investigate structures and functions of complex glycans. He has been at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC) at the University of Georgia as a principal scientist since 2004, where he developed and implemented mass spectrometry based methods for comprehensive “Omics” studies of glycomics, lipidomics, glycolipidomics proteomics and glycoproteomics in a broad range of biological samples, including human and mouse embryonic stem cells, cancer biopsy tissues, model organisms, and human biofluids in order to identify stage- and tissue- specific biomarkers associated with disease progression and cell differentiation. These methods have been employed to characterize a wide variety of complex glycan structures such as N-glycan, O-glycan, glycosphingolipid (GSL), free oligosaccharide (FOS), lipid-linked oligosaccharide (LLO), GPI-anchored glycoprotein and nucleotide sugars, resulting in the identification of novel glycan functions as described in his published work. In addition, he has been developing glycobioinformatics tools for glycan database and glycan annotation software with a bioinformatics team in the CCRC. He has extensive experience in pharmaceutical assessment, evaluating the drug metabolism in aspect of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies in Phase I study at biotechnology company (Bayer HealthCare, Japan). His research experience at the company formed a strong motivation for his career development, which continues to focus on studies for human disorders associated with aberrant glycosylation on lipids and proteins.