Perspective of Glycotechnology

Carbohydrate Recognition for fetter or Worse

Abstract

“Glycotechonology, ” a branch of “Biotechnology.” uses new techniques to manuplate carbohydrates or related materials for the betterment of our lives. its development is intimately related to the progress of glycobiology. These are many aspects of glycobiology that can be applied to glycotechnology. One example is to utilize carbohydrate recognition. Different animal tissues or organs have receptors specific for different sugars. Conjugation of drugs to biospecific carbohydrates can be useful for targetting of drugs to desired tissues or organs. In may cases, carbohydrate receptors strongly prefer multivalency of the carbohydrate stuructures, and thus conjugation to increase valency will results in enhanced binding. For this purpose, proteins or lipids can be modified with defined carbohydrate derivatives to form neoglycoproteins or neoglycolipids which will be specifically bound by the receptors. Alternatively, the oligosaccharides of natural glycoproteins or glycolipids can be modified or removed for the same purpose. some carbohydrates hold promises to be drugs by themselves. Analysis of primary and conformational structures of carbohydrate chains is very important in undeerstanding the biological recognition of carbohydrates, because subtle changes in conformational structures can cause enormous biological effects. This is most dramatically demonstrated by binding of two kinds of fetuin triantennary oligosaccharides by mammalian hepatic lectin. Chemically or chemoenzymatically constructed carbohydrates can be extremely useful for deciphering binding specificity as wll as to probe the effect of glycoside clustering.