Glycans coat nearly every living cell and act as information-rich barcodes that proteins across the tree of life read to distinguish friend from foe. Predicting which glycan a given glycan-binding protein will recognize has long depended on painstaking structural biology. A recent Science Advances study reframes the problem with a lightweight machine-learning model named MCNet, […]

Mass spectrometry has long been regarded as the gold standard for reading out the glycan structures that decorate proteins, lipids, and other biomolecules. Yet the discipline of Glycomics has repeatedly collided with a practical bottleneck: the datasets produced by liquid chromatography or capillary electrophoresis coupled to MS are so dense, so large, and so structurally […]

Checkpoint blockade has reshaped cancer care, yet a large fraction of patients never respond to the antibodies now in the clinic. One underappreciated reason is that tumors wrap themselves in sugar coatings that quietly tell immune cells to stand down. A new study reframes these sugars as druggable switches rather than passive decorations. Glycomics has […]

Carbohydrates participate in virtually every biological process, yet the chemical diversity of glycans far exceeds that of DNA or proteins, and high-throughput sequencing of these molecules remains out of reach. Mass spectrometry (MS) is the most advanced technique in glycomics, but assigning identities to spectral peaks has long depended on curated experimental databases or manual […]

Carbohydrates mediate many biological processes through multivalent interactions, yet translating this chemistry into nanomaterials has been difficult: carbohydrate ligands are bulky and highly water-soluble, and scaffolds that present them usually rely on co-assembly with unmodified building blocks, diluting ligand density and erasing precise spatial control. Hribernik, et al. (2026) reported a supramolecular strategy in which […]

Sialic acids cap the termini of many mammalian glycoproteins and glycolipids, where they govern immune recognition, host–pathogen interaction, brain development, and tumor progression. Yet accessing homogeneous sialoglycans—the glycans that carry these residues—remains a long-standing bottleneck in carbohydrate chemistry. A recent study by Zhang et al. (2026) introduces a practical solution: a one-pot α-sialylation protocol built […]

Almost all eukaryotic cell surfaces and secreted proteins are modified by complex carbohydrates, known as glycans, which regulate processes ranging from protein folding and cell–cell communication to immune responses and fertilization. Aberrant glycosylation is linked to inflammation, autoimmunity, allergy, and cancer. Diverse, well-defined glycan collections are essential for studying glycan-binding proteins, serving as reference standards […]

Carbohydrates, or glycans, are the most abundant organic molecules on Earth and participate in a wide range of biological processes, from protein folding and immune regulation to cell wall architecture. However, Glycan Profiling and determining high-resolution structures of glycans have long been exceptionally challenging due to the remarkable diversity of monosaccharides, complex branching patterns, and […]