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Nature Chemical Biology 2, 659–660 (1 December 2006) | doi:10.1038/nchembio1206-659

A sweet success for substrate engineering

Byron R Griffith & Jon S Thorson

Acquiring the ability to chemically synthesize complex oligosaccharides in pure form and substantial quantity is an important challenge in chemical biology. The enzymes that make and degrade these complicated sugar polymers in nature (glycosyltransferases and glycosidases, respectively) can also be used in vitro and often offer much better control over how individual sugar residues are connected than do corresponding chemical methods.