Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS AND VIEWS

Machine assembly of carbohydrates with more than 1,000 sugar units

Efforts to probe the biological functions of carbohydrates have long been limited by the lack of such molecules with well-defined structures. An automated carbohydrate synthesizer has been developed that could remedy this.
  1. Hanchao Cheng

    1. Hanchao Cheng is in the Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518000, People’s Republic of China.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  2. Peng George Wang

    1. Peng George Wang is in the Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518000, People’s Republic of China.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

Carbohydrates not only are a biochemical source of energy, but also have key roles in biological-signal transmission, cell recognition and as structural components of living organisms1. Naturally occurring carbohydrates are often structurally undefined — they consist of mixtures of molecules, complicating studies of their biological activity. Structurally well-defined carbohydrates (which consist of just one type of molecule) are therefore in great demand for biological studies, but have been difficult to synthesize, especially when the molecules are large. Writing in Nature Synthesis, Yao et al.2 report an impressive solution to this long-standing problem: an automated carbohydrate synthesizer that greatly streamlines the preparation of large carbohydrates in solution by reducing the number of steps in which intermediate compounds must be isolated.

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Nature 610, 266-267 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02927-x

References

  1. Varki, A. Nature 446, 1023–1029 (2007).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Yao, W. et al. Nature Synth. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44160-022-00171-9 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Wu, Y., Xiong, D.-C., Chen, S.-C., Wang, Y.-S. & Ye, X.-S. Nature Commun. 8, 14851 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Zhang, J. et al. Angew. Chem. Int. Edn 57, 16638–16642 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Li, T. et al. Nature Chem. 11, 229–236 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Nokami, T. et al. Org. Lett. 15, 4520–4523 (2013).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  7. Joseph, A. A., Pardo-Vargas, A. & Seeberger, P. H. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 142, 8561–8564 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Wang, Y., Carder, H. M. & Wendlandt, A. E. Nature 578, 403–408 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  9. Sears, P. & Wong, C.-H. Science 291, 2344–2350 (2001).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Li, C. & Wang, L.-X. Chem. Rev. 118, 8359–8413 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  11. Khongorzul, P., Ling, C. J., Khan, F. U., Ihsan, A. U. & Zhang, J. Mol. Cancer Res. 18, 3–19 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links