Carbohydrate Group

The Carbohydrate Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry currently has a membership around 400, which comprises approximately 300 from the UK and 100 from overseas. The Group held its first meeting in the offices of the Chemical Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London in September 1966, and over several decades it has successfully brought together carbohydrate chemists and biochemists to explore the rich fields of natural product synthetic chemistry, polysaccharide technology and physicochemistry and the emerging disciplines of the glycosciences.

Glycotechnology is leading to new products and understanding in biomedicine, firstly via mammalian glycoconjugates (i.e. oligosaccharide chains linked to proteins and lipids which are involved in cell function, interactions within the extracellular matrix and cell recognition inside and outside the tissues) and secondly via non-mammalian glycoconjugates and polysaccharides which are potential pharmaceuticals and targets for drug design. For example, plants and seaweed have oligosaccharides with many pharmacological effects, microbial antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs contain monosaccharide components, and cell walls of micro-organisms are targets for immunotherapy. Polysaccharides from the agricultural industry are multi-million pound commercial products in many industrial and domestic areas and are set to gain further prominence as green fuel sources and neutraceuticals (health from diet). 

Studies of interactions between carbohydrates and proteins are vital in understanding the potential controls of many biological processes. The UK has provided much of the basic research needed to understand the underlying biochemistry and exploit the results via synthetic carbohydrate chemistry. Nature has invested much time in devising enzymes and receptors which are highly specific in their interactions with carbohydrates. Orders of magnitude of structural information and diversity can more readily be carried in carbohydrates in comparison with peptides of the same molecular size. The demands on the synthetic chemist to provide ever more potent strategies has further stimulated this exciting field.