Recently Discovered Health Care Alternatives
The development of a variety of new technologies for exploring the composition of sugar chains has opened up a new frontier of molecular biology which has been named glycobiology. This word was first coined in 1988 by Rademacher, Parekh, and Dwek to name the coming together of the known variations of carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry with new understanding of the cellular and molecular biology of glycans. The name glycobiology has acquired wide acceptance, with an important biomedical journal, a growing scientific society, and a Gordon Research Conference now using this title.
Defined in the broadest terms, glycobiology is the research of the composition, biosynthesis, and biology of saccharides (sugar chains or glycans) that are widely distributed in nature. It is one of the most rapidly growing fields in the biomedical sciences, with relevance to normal research, biomedicine, and biotechnology.
Certainly, many biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and laboratory supply companies have invested heavily in the area. The area ranges from the chemistry of carbohydrates and the enzymology of glycan-modifying proteins to the roles of glycans in complex biological systems, and their regulation by a variety of techniques.
Glycosaminoglycans
In recent times, important studies of a type of linear glycans (complex sugar chains) called glycosaminoglycans (or GAGs for short), and specially a sub-set called HSGAGs, which are made up of heparan sulfate and its relative heparin have been specially important in shedding a good deal of light on the role of the glycoconjugates.
Constructing the Chains
An HSGAG chain can be generically described as a regular repeat of about 10 to 100 disaccharide building blocks that, when gathered together, make up the backbone of each sugar molecule. In its most basic configuration, each disaccharide unit consists of two chemically distinct monosaccharides (a uronic acid and a glucosamine) linked by a glycosidic bond.
The chains can change a great deal in their structural configuration because the disaccharide building blocks can be chemically modified at a number of positions. These changes include the elimination of the two-carbon acetyl groups at the amino position of the glucosamine portion and the addition of sulfate groups at many different locations, along with differences in the stereochemical disposition of bonds around specific carbons.
Different combinations of these many chemical changes make it possible for even short chains to have an enormous quantity of structural permutations. In fact, the potential for an enormous quantity of structural information to be embedded in a glycan exceeds that of nucleic acids or proteins.
