Interesting Facts About Glycans

By: Richard D. Cummings

While plant cellulose is very famous, many commercial products containing cellulose actually use bacterial cellulose.  It is often a part of bacterial biofilms, typically of...

By: Richard D. Cummings

The definition of a rare sugar is a monosaccharide that is found in small quantities relative to more common sugars in nature, e.g., glucose and N-acetylglucosamine (1-3). ...

By: Richard D. Cummings

Sialic acid is a nonose (9-carbon) monosaccharide found in many organisms.  All vertebrates have sialic acid, while most invertebrates do not have sialic acid, but there are...

By: Richard D. Cummings

Collagen is the most common and abundant glycoprotein in animals (1).  Even sponges have collagen (termed spongin) and it is glycosylated much like mammalian collagen.  Its...

By: Richard D. Cummings

Many different monosaccharides from trioses (3-carbon) to decoses (10-carbon) and above are found in nature (1).  The most famous nonose (9-carbon) in human glycans is N...

By: Richard D. Cummings

A peptide is usually considered to be a linkage of 2 to 50 amino acids via peptide bonds, and proteins are larger than 50 or so amino acids.  In animal cells, peptides and...

By: Richard D. Cummings

O-GlcNAc is a major reversible modification of Ser/Thr residues found on thousands of intracellular glycoproteins in the nucleus, cytoplasm, and mitochondria, and links...

By: Richard D. Cummings

The disaccharide lactose, Galβ1-4Glc, is found only in the milk of mammals, and so far, it and extended milk oligosaccharides derived from it, are found nowhere else in nature...

By: Richard D. Cummings

L-Ascorbic acid, vitamin C, is termed a ‘sugar acid’ or ‘acidic sugar’, and is a derivative of glucose with a carboxyl group at C1 (1).  In mammals, UDP-glucuronic acid is the...

By: Richard D. Cummings

Cholesterol can be glycosylated, and indeed glucosylated cholesterol is common (1).  In animal cells, it is a β-D-glucopyranoside derivative of cholesterol (GlcChol), which is...

One of the most complex polysaccharides in nature is pectin, found in plant cell walls (1,2).  Pectin is a family of galacturonic acid-rich polysaccharides that includes...

By: Richard D. Cummings

One of the smallest known naturally-occurring glycoprotein in mammals is likely to be CD24, also known as nectadrin. Although it behaves in analyses as a 23-60 kDa...

By: Richard D. Cummings

While the N-glycosylation sequon N-X-S/T in glycoproteins of plants, fungi, and animals, is well known, there are many reports of alternative sequons for N-glycosylation in...