Synthesis of Carbohydrates Through Biotechnology discusses the engineering of glycosyltransferases and carbohydrate-active enzymes for preparative purposes, structure-function studies, chemo-enzymatic carbohydrate synthesis, and new approaches on carbohydrate-based drug discoveries. Practitioners in the carbohydrate and genetic engineering fields, especially those in the medicinal, chemical, and pharmaceutical areas, will find this book useful.
Carbohydrates and their conjugates occur in biological and immunological processes such as molecular recognition and host-pathogen interactions. Carbohydrate structures also frequently change upon carcinogenic transformation. Glycomics, which is the study of an organism's entire array of oligosaccharides, is now emerging as the third informatics wave after genomics and proteomics. This major area will help us understand the molecular phenotype. Because of the complexities of carbohydrates, the function of the majority of carbohydrates in biological systems still needs to be explored.
Although carbohydrates are less interesting targets for drug development, they are important components in many valuable therapeutics such antibiotics and anticancer agents. For these reasons, more reliable technologies to efficiently assemble glycoconjugates are absolutely needed to enable their studies.
