Carbohydrate is a familiar term. It’s the bagel you had for breakfast, the bread in your sandwich, the slice of cake you’re thinking about sneaking later today.
Carbohydrate is a familiar term. It’s the bagel you had for breakfast, the bread in your sandwich, the slice of cake you’re thinking about sneaking later today. But carbs aren’t only in baked goods, and they’re not just found in foods. Small yet structurally complex carbohydrates serve as elements of cell walls and are important in intercellular interactions.
Scientists can quickly and reliably make many biomolecules, from DNA to proteins, using automated instruments. So it may come as a surprise that for decades, scientists have had major difficulty with small carbohydrates.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPIKG) have discovered a way to selectively create the links that connect single sugars into short-chain carbohydrates, called oligosaccharides. The new technique enables precise control over the stereochemistry, or handedness, of the connecting bonds between sugar molecules. The team successfully used this method to construct sugar chains on an automated instrument.
Their results, published in Nature Synthesis, will provide biologists and biochemists access to oligosaccharides that were previously difficult to construct. This, in turn, could open up new avenues of biomedical research into these versatile molecules.
Read More: University of California - Santa Barbara
Photo Credit: RaviKrishnappa via Pixabay
