The closing years of the second millennium have been uplifting for carbohydrate biology. Optimism that oligosaccharide sequences are bearers of crucial biological information has been borne out by the constellation of efforts of carbohydrate chemists, biochemists, immunochemists, and cell- and molecular biologists. The direct involvement of specific oligosaccharide sequences in protein targeting and folding, and in mechanisms of infection, inflammation and immunity is now unquestioned. With the emergence of families of proteins with carbohydrate-binding activities, assignments of information content for defined oligosaccharide sequences will become more common, but the pinpointing and elucidation of the bioactive domains on oligosaccharides will continue to pose challenges even to the most experienced carbohydrate biologists. The neoglycolipid technology incorporates some of the key requirements for this challenge: namely the resolution of complex glycan mixtures, and ligand binding coupled with sequence determination by mass spectrometry.
monoclonal antibodies, mass spectrometry, blood group antigen, carbohydrate ligands, differentiation antigens, embryonic development, galectins, inflammation, leukocyte adhesion, neoglycolipids, oligosaccharide ligands, oligosaccharid probes, selectins
NCBI PubMed ID: 11421348Journal NLM ID: 8603310Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers
Correspondence: t.feizi@ic.ac.uk
Institutions: The Glycosciences Laboratory, Imperial College School of Medicine, Harrow, United Kingdom
Found