Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editorial overview

1994; Elsevier BV; Volume: 4; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0959-440x(94)90164-3

1879-033X

Ten Feizi, David R. Bundle,

Signaling Pathways in Disease

The word sugar conjures up many different thoughts: The child dreams of the sweet taste she will experience from that first spoonful of dessert; the cane field worker considers how many stalks he will cut down that day; the diabetic remembers blood work she recently received with an important number below 100; the knowledgeable phlebotomists remembers that the difference between patients 12 and 13 are the ABO groups on their respective erythrocytes. Although often interchangeable with sugar, the word carbohydrate may evoke a separate response: Even though Dr. Atkins told me there are too many of them in that bagel, I will need to load up on them before the marathon on Saturday. However, to the glycoscientist, these words foster thoughts of a very different design, for example: (1) Which orthogonal protecting group will I use on that glycosyl acceptor? (2) What protocols will I use in the ion trap mass spectrometry to define the glycome of that immune cell type? (3) How will I determine the substrate specificity of that novel glycosyltransferase whose overexpression leads to metastasis? (4) What sort of imaging probe can I design to bind to a novel structure in a metabolically-labeled cell surface N-linked glycan? (5) How can I build a glycopolymer that will mimic a bacterial cell wall polysaccharide as a potential antimicrobial material? In one form or another, the glycosciences are a part of nearly all fields that encompass the life and physical sciences. In this article, I will outline the various roles that sugars/carbohydrates/glycans/saccharides play in both our day-to-day lives and nearly every important cellular process in the simplest microbes to humans. After an introduction to glycans in general, the text will concentrate on the past 15 years, with details of the new challenges that have arisen, how some of them have been resolved, what the new directions in glycosciences are and where the field may be headed in the next decade.