Sugars were once credited with magical healing powers but are now seen like salt as an evil necessary in small doses but the cause of numerous diseases such as diabetes if taken in excess. Yet latest research suggests this view ignores the vital role played by more complex sugars in many biological structures, and the great therapeutic potential they have.
A recent workshop organized by the European Science Foundation (ESF) focused on the current state of the art in glycoscience, the study of complex sugars in biology.
A key point was that complex sugars are involved every time cells, and smaller structures within cells, communicate or bind with each other. This means they play a major part in all processes, including immune recognition and brain functions such as memory.
It also means complex carbohydrates are often implicated in diseases where these functions go wrong, including auto-immune disorders such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, as well as some cancers. The immune response often depends on the identity and location of sugars on antigens, which are the surface molecules on pathogens such as bacteria, or in principle any cells or smaller biological components such as protein complexes, that are recognised by the body’s own machinery for detecting foreign bodies.
Complex sugars such as polysaccharides are core components of antigens, alongside lipids (fatty compounds) and proteins. These antigens in effect determine the outcome of an infectious disease and the response by the host organism such as human - structural differences between these antigens often account for the inability of many diseases to cross from one animal species to another and this is exemplified in the case of influenza where key molecules on the virus interacty with different complex sugars in birds and humans.
The ESF workshop identified the need to build momentum behind glycoscience, whose importance has been grossly undervalued, and in particular to boost European research.
According to the workshop, the profile of the field needs boosting not just among the public, but also within the scientific community, which has tended to downplay the importance of glycoscience partly because it seems too complicated to understand and analyse.
“The chemistry of glycoscience is extremely difficult,” said Tony Merry from Manchester University in the UK, but it is possible to simplify the chemistry and define it in terms of essential active constituents and interactions, as has been done for DNA and proteins, which are built up from more straightforward components, respectively nucleic acids and amino acids.
According to Merry a similar rationalization is needed for carbohydrates to bring glycomics – the science of sugars in general – onto the same footing as genomics (genes) and proteomics (proteins). The attendees stated that glycomics, genomics and proteomics are all equal cogs in the overall mechanism of biology, to the extent that progress in developing therapies depends on integrating the three together rather than advancing on one front while ignoring another.
