Rhea Bains is a PhD candidate in the Withers Lab at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on discovering and engineering carbohydrate-active enzymes, with a particular emphasis on glycoside hydrolases. Through bioinformatic approaches, she has identified a new family of glycoside hydrolases, which have been engineered to synthesize a range of sulfated oligosaccharides, including N- and O-glycans involved in immune recognition. Additionally, her work involves designing novel fluorescence-quenched probes to identify enzymes involved in N-glycan degradation. These probes have been utilized in ultra-high throughput droplet-based screening to uncover microbial N-glycan degrading pathways across diverse metagenomic libraries.

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