Introduction to Glycomics

Posted by beauty33 on May 30th, 2019

In the late 20th century, after genomics and proteomics, glycomics has also received more and more attention. glycomics is a new subject in the study of the composition and function of sugar chains, and a follow-up and extension of genomics. The specific content includes the study of the relationship and interaction between sugar and sugar, between sugar and protein, and between sugar and nucleic acid. The main object of research is polysaccharides.

Abundant and diverse polysaccharides cover all cells of biological organisms, which not only reflect the type and state of cells, but also participate in many biological behaviors, such as cell development, differentiation, tumor metastasis, microbial infection, immune response and so on. Besides, it also shows the evolution of organisms and molecules, such as glycolysis, the conserved nature of biosynthesis, and the origin of ribosomes. Let's talk about the specific function of polysaccharides:

1.  The polysaccharides play a role of folding and associating in glycoprotein nascent peptide chains. Studies have shown that n-glycan plays an important role in participating in the folding of new peptides and maintaining the correct conformation of proteins. For example, if red blood cell hemagglutinin lacks n-glycan, it cannot fold into a trimer;
2.  polysaccharides also affect the secretion and stability of glycoproteins. If immunoglobulin lacks n-glycan, it cannot be secreted outside the cell and remains in the endoplasmic reticulum;
3.  Polysaccharides involve in molecular recognition and cell recognition. For example, many proteins in the serum are n-glycan with sialic acid residues as terminals, called sialic acid glycoproteins, such as immunoglobulin, protein hormones, and carrier proteins. Beyond that, they are also involved in sperm and egg recognition and cell adhesion etc.;
4.  Polysaccharides affects the biological activity of glycoproteins. The activity of enzyme, hormone and igG is related to them;

There is no doubt that if you try to understand the complicated rules of life, there must be " genomics - proteomics -glycomics 'concept of overall, so that you would have possible to reveal all its gene function, thus further in-depth study of the pathogenesis of diseases, effectively control the occurrence, development and prognosis of diseases, screening and disease, predictive diagnostic markers, and the development of new drug targets.

The research of glycomics is much more complicated than genomics and proteomics. At present, glycoproteins are the focus of glycomics. In order to better correlate with proteomics, the object of study is glycopeptide. The core strategy of research is:

1) Analyze all the polysaccharides produced by a single species;

2) Take Glycoproteins as the research object in order to identify the genes that encode glycoproteins;

3) The properties of glycoprotein glycoproteins were studied by combining effective physical and biochemical properties;

The point of the study is:

1) The gene that encodes glycoproteins;

2) The actual glycosylation site;

3) Structural Characterization of Glycans;

4) The function of glycosylation;

The study of glycomics is divided into three parts: Structural glycomics, functional glycomics and bioinformatics; Among them, structural glycomics mainly includes "glyco-catch" technology, frontier affinity chromatography technology and so on, while functional glycomics mainly includes carbohydrate microarray technology, etc.

Compared with genome and proteomics, glycomics is still in its infancy. The main obstacles to the rapid development of glycomics are the limitations of research techniques and the complexity of the structure of glycan themselves. Currently, there is no technology that can rapidly and extensively determine all the glycan structures of cells. Although there are still many problems, the arrival of a new era of glycomics research is inevitable, and more and more scientists are engaged in this field. It is believed that with further research, people's understanding of the nature of life will reach new heights.