2018 Molecular and Cellular Proteomics/American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Lectureship Award

The Molecular and Cellular Proteomics (MCP)/American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Lectureship Award will be presented to Kay-Hooi Khoo at the Society for Glycobiology Annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. The MCP Journal was created in 2001 to address the growing needs of the proteomics community. Subsequently the MCP/ASBMB award was established in 2013 to honor scientists that have been at the forefront of the emerging field of glycomics and glycoproteomics.

This year’s recipient is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow and Acting Director of the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Dr Khoo was trained in glycoconjugate mass spectrometry in Anne Dell’s lab at Imperial College London before moving to Colorado State University as a Heiser Fellow for Research in Leprosy and Tuberculosis. He commenced his independent career at the Academia Sinica in 1996 where he rapidly established a world class proteomics/glycomics research facility. This facility is now a beacon for glycobiologists seeking his specialist expertise. Dr Khoo specializes in devising exquisitely sensitive techniques for mapping functionally important glycan epitopes in complex glycomes. Particularly notable is his high-throughput nanoLC-MS²/MS³-based high precision glycomics platform, which exploits in-house computational tools for data mining of glycotopes. Dr Khoo is also internationally recognized for his robust and sensitive sulfoglycomics methodologies, which he has exploited in collaborative research to gain novel insights into the roles of sulfo-sialylated glycans in the immune system. Other exciting applications of his versatile mass spectrometric technologies include the quantitative determination of site-specific cysteine modifications, and unravelling pathways involved in the biosynthesis of the core domains of the highly unusual phosphorylated O-glycans of alpha-dystroglycan. As well as being an outstanding scientist, Dr Khoo is an exemplar of excellent citizenship. He has given continued service to the Editorial Boards of Glycobiology and MCP since 2001 and 2012, respectively, has been a Member of the Councils of the Taiwan Societies of Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics for more than a decade, and served on the Steering Committee of the Asian Community of Glycoscience and Glycotechnology from 2009 to 2017.