Glycome Atlas
Glycome pillar
The enzyme-directed pathways that build, attach, edit, and remove glycans from proteins and lipids.
Glycoengineering is the deliberate reshaping of the sugars on cells or protein drugs. Instead of accepting whatever sugars a cell happens to add, scientists redesign the pathway to get a specific, consistent sugar pattern.
Read reviewed entryGlycosidases are enzymes that cut sugar chains apart. They remove sugars during glycan processing, recycle glycans in the lysosome, and let organisms harvest sugars from food and from each other.
Read reviewed entryGlycosylation is the controlled process by which cells attach sugar chains to proteins and fats. Special enzymes add sugars one at a time as the protein is being made and packaged, building a coat of complex carbohydrates. This is how most proteins that end up on the cell surface or that are secreted into blood get their final, working form.
Read reviewed entryGlycosyltransferases are the enzymes that build sugar chains. Each one takes an activated sugar and attaches it, in a specific place and orientation, to a growing glycan, protein, or lipid, so the cell assembles glycans in a controlled, stepwise way.
Read reviewed entryGPI anchoring, also called glypiation, is a way cells attach certain proteins to the outside of the cell using a special sugar-and-fat tag instead of threading the protein through the membrane. The tag is built ahead of time, and an enzyme swaps it onto the end of the protein, letting the fatty part sit in the membrane like a buoy holding the protein at the surface.
Read reviewed entryMucin O-glycans are the thick forest of sugar chains attached to mucin proteins. They are so dense that they coat the protein backbone and give mucus its water-holding, gel-like character.
Read reviewed entryN-linked glycosylation is a way cells attach a large, ready-made sugar tree to proteins at a specific spot: the amino acid asparagine, whenever it appears in a short recognizable pattern in the protein. The whole sugar block is added in one move inside the cell and then trimmed and reshaped into its final form.
Read reviewed entryO-linked glycosylation is a way cells attach sugar chains to proteins at the amino acids serine and threonine. Unlike the N-linked pathway, there is no fixed recognition pattern, and the chain is built up one sugar at a time in the Golgi starting with a sugar called GalNAc. This is the type of glycosylation that gives mucus proteins their dense sugar coating.
Read reviewed entryTherapeutic antibodies carry a small sugar group on a fixed spot of their tail region. This sugar is not decoration; it controls how well the antibody recruits immune cells to destroy a target such as a tumor cell.
Read reviewed entry