Matthew Pratt, PhD

Matthew Pratt, PhD, received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley before moving to Rockefeller University as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow and then starting his independent career at the University of Southern California (USC) in 2009. Dr. Pratt’s laboratory is primarily focused on the development and application of chemical tools and approaches towards a more complete understanding of protein glycosylation. They use chemistry to create and apply probes (reporters and inhibitors) of glycosylation to investigate the cell biology of glycosylation, and we exploit synthetic protein chemistry to build site-specifically glycosylated proteins and understand how the biophysics, biochemistry, etc. of substrates are affected. Notably, Dr. Pratt’s lab used synthetic proteins to discovery that an endogenous form of glycosylation, termed O-GlcNAc, inhibits the aggregation and/or pathogenicity of α-synuclein. This discovery catalyzed the possibility that inhibitors that elevate O-GlcNAc, some in clinical trails already, could be potential PD therapeutics.