Classes of Glycans

Three important classes of glycans exist in nature  

Glycosaminoglycans. These glycans are linear carbohydrate chains that are comprised of repeating disaccharide units. 

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For biopharmaceuticals, quantitative monosaccharide profiling allows detection of residues indicative of undesired glycosylation (e. g. NeuGc) or the classes of glycans (for example, the presence of GalNAc indicates 0-glycosylation). For technical reasons, neutral and A-acetylat-ed residues are generally profiled separately from sialic acids. 

Table 1. Different classes of glycans suggested in carbohydrate-carbohydrate interactions.

Classes of glycan structures associated with carbohydrate-carbohydrate binding... 

Indicates whether identical or different sequences of the same class of glycans are interacting with... 

Since the breakthrough discovery by the Bertozzi group in 1997 that bioorthogonal ligation can take place on the surface of live cells [52], several different classes of glycans have been successfully detected using this method by... 

Fig. 15.1. The A/-glycan biosynthetic pathway, illustrating how the three classes of A/-glycans (high mannose, hybrid and complex glycans) are derived from a common biosynthetic precursor. The trimannosyl-chitobiose core, which is common to all A/-glycans, is outlined on the precursor A/-glycan. Glc, o Man, GIcNAc.

The glycoproteins, together with the glycolipids, constitute the class of the glycoconjugates, the classification of which is given in Fig. 1 that is, the glycoconjugates are the products of association between a carbohydrate, which is called a glycan, with either a protein or a lipid. 

Bolmstedt, A.J., et al. 2001. Cyanovirin-N defines a new class of antiviral agent targeting N-linked, high-mannose glycans in an oligosaccharide-specific manner. Mol Pharmacol 59 949. 

B. G. Davis, The controlled glycosylation of a protein with a bivalen glycan Towards a new class of glycoconjugates, glycodendriproteins, Chem. Commun. (2001) 351-352. 

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