Welcome to the Sheehan Lab webpage.

The Sheehan Lab is located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Our laboratory is established with a wide range of state of the art biochemical, chemical and physical methods including MALDI and ESI mass spectrometry, electron and atomic force microscopy, hydrodynamics, theoretical molecular dynamics and a variety of surface physics tools to study human tracheobrochial epithelial secretion and it's dominant molecules, mucins which is heavily glycoslyayted glycoproteins whose mass is destined to be dominated by O-linked carbohydrates

Mucus is an integrated, intelligent, active visco-elastic gel matrix, employed generically to protect bio-surfaces exposed to the environment, from physical, chemical and pathological erosion. It forms the basis of what is termed the innate immune system, a complex network of enzymes and scavenging proteins, that detect, immobilize, destroy and/or remove a range of foreign bodies, toxins and pathological factors that would otherwise overwhelm our humoral immune system. In the human large airway surface there is clear evidence for two distinctive zones or layers to the gel barrier which has been visualized in both tissues and human bronchial epithelial (HBE) air-liquid interface cell culture. One zone termed the peri-ciliary liquid layer (PCL) surrounds the microvilli and reaches to the top of the cilia, a thickness of about 7u, the other is the 10-30u characteristic flowing mucus layer above.

                                                                                                                           This site was last updated 09/15/05  Webmaster: Mehmet Kesimer