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Supramolecular chemistry

Sticking to sugars

Nature volume 464, pages 169–170 (2010)Cite this article

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If evolution has had trouble making effective carbohydrate receptors, what hope do humans have of creating synthetic versions? A method for preparing libraries of such receptors boosts the chances of success.

Carbohydrate recognition — the process in which receptors bind to specific carbohydrate molecules — is a difficult task, best left, one might think, to biological molecules that have evolved to do the job. Chemists have nevertheless taken up the challenge of finding synthetic receptors for carbohydrates, and are beginning to succeed. Reporting in Angewandte Chemie, Pal et al.1 describe a family of peptide-based receptors that incorporates synthetic, carbohydrate-binding amino acids. By screening 400 variants of these receptors, the authors discovered one that selectively binds to a tumour-associated carbohydrate that might be used as a diagnostic marker for cancer.

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Figure 1: Synthetic carbohydrate receptors.

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  1. Anthony P. Davis is in the School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TS, UK. anthony.davis@bristol.ac.uk ,

    Anthony P. Davis

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  1. Anthony P. Davis
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Davis, A. Sticking to sugars. Nature 464, 169–170 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/464169a

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