Sugar-Coated Proteins

In medical research studies, the sugar pill is usually the so-called placebo a dummy pill that scientists administer to half of a test group of patients to evaluate how well the real pill works. In an interesting twist, biochemist Hudson Freeze of the Burnham Institute in La 

By doing so, the cells would lose critical docking sites that normally render the cells capable of sticking to each other—a key step in setting off an inflammatory response. Her hunch was correct  

A few members of a new class of synthetic sugar molecules called neoglycopolymers can perform this trick, causing L-selectin molecules on meandering cells first to cluster and then to fall off cell surfaces. Neoglycopolymers are simple to make and halt inflammatory processes in a distinctly different way than do existing anti-inflammatory drugs, such as aspirin or ibuprofen. While these medicines block 

One especially exciting avenue is the potential for scientists to make from scratch the various sugars that reside on the surfaces of bacteria and viruses. The ability to mimic such sugars will grant scientists the capacity to design new vaccines to control these disease-causing microorganisms. 

4 So-called protecting groups (T) help chemists prevent unwanted chemical reactions. 

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Normal circulating levels of tPA are low, so that to accomplish this dramatic clot breakdown one would need the amount of tPA contained in 50,000 liters of blood. This is clearly not practical. Instead, the molecule has been cloned and expressed in mammalian cells so that it can be produced in quantity. Using cells from mammals, rather than bacteria, results in a product molecule that has the same folding, internal bonding, and coat of sugar residues as the natural protein. 

Just as the amino acids, sugars, and nucleotides are the building blocks for formation of proteins, polysaccharides, and nucleic acids, these three kinds of macromolecule are the units from which larger subcellular structures are assembled. Fibers, microtubules, virus "coats," and small symmetric groups of subunits in oligomeric proteins all result from the packing of macromolecules in well-defined ways, something that is often called quaternary structure. 

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