Glycochemistry and glycobiology: a web themed issue

摘要

More than 100 years ago, the second Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emil Fischer. Today every student knows about his brilliant logical deduction of the stereochemistry of glucose, one of the first milestones in carbohydrate chemistry. For the following decades carbohydrates were only studied with respect to their role in energy storage and supply. It actually took until the 1980s for chemists to start to develop methods to assemble complex oligosacchar-ides. This was the prerequisite to elucidating their function in numerous biological recognition processes. A variety of methods to access complex glycans are available today and set the stage for the biological,biochemical and biophysical investigation of oligosaccharides and respective glyco-conjugates.