Currently located in the Biomedical Chemistry Institute in the Department of Chemistry at New York University, the Mahal Laboratory specializes in developing and utilizing cutting edge chemical and systems biology tools to understand glycosylation in human health and disease.

AS OF SEPTEMBER 2019, WE WILL BE MOVING THE THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA IN EDMONTON, ALBERTA, WHERE PROF. MAHAL WILL BE THE CANADA EXCELLENCE RESEARCH CHAIR IN GLYCOMICS!

For the past 15 years my laboratory has been at the forefront of creating and utilizing systems-based approaches to decode the glycome, sifting the important signals from the noise. Our initial work towards this goal focused on the creation of a simple, yet powerful tool to profile the glycosylation of complex samples, lectin microarrays.  A unique aspect of our work is the incorporation of a two-color approach into our technology, wherein samples are directly compared to a biological reference. This modification, made early on in our technology development, has enabled us to easily combine our data with other datasets (e.g. transcriptome, miRNA), enabling a truly integrated systems-approach to decoding the functional glycome and has led to our recent work leveraging miRNA to identify functionally relevant glycans (miRNA proxy approach). Our current and ongoing research interests can be categorized into three major categories: 1. Identifying and leveraging glycan-control mechanisms to decode the functional glycome (miRNA proxy approach). 2.  Using systems- approaches to determine the roles of glycans in host-pathogen interactions and host response.  and 3. Systems-based approaches to identifying glycans driving cancer pathogenesis.