The Development of Carbohydrate Chemistry and Biology

A major proportion of the organic matter on Earth is plant tissue ( biomass ) and is composed of carbohydrates, principally cellulose. This is the structural support polymer of land plants and the material used since ancient times in the form of cotton and linen textiles, and later as paper. Chitin is a polymer related to cellulose that has skeletal function in arthropods and fungi. Other polymeric carbohydrates constitute the structural support framework for marine plants and the cell walls of microorganisms. The sweet carbohydrate of sugar cane, now termed sucrose, has been a dietary item for at least 10 millennia. 

The photosynthetic apparatus in the green plant utilizes solar energy to effect the reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide in a complex sequence of reactions 

To name the various compounds, Fischer and others laid the foundations of a terminology still in use, based on the terms triose, tetrose, pentose, and hexose. He endorsed Armstrong s proposal to classify sugars into aldoses and ketoses, and proposed the name fructose for levulose because he found that the sign of optical rotation was not a suitable criterion for grouping sugars into families. 

The Cahn-Ingold-Prelog R,S system of stereodesignators (13), introduced much later for naming other natural products, is not used for sugars as it would lead to unwieldy names. 

---

The first four chapters deal with different aspects of carbohydrate chemistry. In Chapter 1, Derek Horton discusses the development of carbohydrate chemistry and biology from antiquity to the present and beyond and summarizes the structures and methods for structural analysis of complex carbohydrates. In Chapter 2, Bo Xie and Catherine Costello review the state-of-art application of mass spectrometry to the structural analysis of complex carbohydrates. In Chapter 3, Zhongwu Guo briefly summarizes the types of glycosylation methods and synthetic strategies that are commonly used in the chemical synthesis of glycoconjugates. Enzymes have simplified the synthesis of some oligosaccharides, and in Chapter 4,... 

---