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Nature 421, 219-220 (16 January 2003) | doi:10.1038/421219a

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Sugars tied to the spot

Sabine L. Flitsch & Rein V Ulijn

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The interactions of sugars and proteins underlie many biological processes, and cataloguing them is a daunting task. A technique for attaching sugars to microarrays offers a promising, high-throughput solution.

Of the three main classes of biopolymers — proteins, nucleic acids and sugars — the sugars, or saccharides, are the most complex and hence the most difficult to study. Each monosaccharide building-block has multiple attachment sites, which means that sugars can be built in a variety of linear or branched fashions.

  1. Sabine L. Flitsch and Rein V. Ulijn are in the School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh, Joseph Black Building, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JJ, UK.

Correspondence to: e-mail: Email: sabine.flitsch@ed.ac.uk; Email: rein.ulijn@ed.ac.uk