Publication Date:
2023-02-02
Description:
Glycomics, the study of entire complement of sugars in an organism, helps to analyze the interaction of sugar with other macromolecules like carbohydrates, proteins, and nucleic acid. Greater structural complexity, nonlinear relationship of glycans with genome, and difficulty in isolation, characterization, and synthesis of complex oligosaccharides pose a significant challenge to glycomics. The isolation of plant glycoconjugates from natural sources is a complex process due to the lack of high-throughput user-friendly tools. Recent chemical advances have opened new and exciting possibilities in obtaining pure and chemically defined glycan moieties. Chromatographic techniques, tandem mass spectrometry, MALDI-mass spectrometry, ESI-mass spectrometry, NMR spectroscopy, and carbohydrate/lectin microarray are important tools for glycomics. Glycogene microarrays are useful to identify differentially expressed glycosylation-related genes and to study glycan biosynthesis, structure, and function. Efficient glycoinformatics have considerably enhanced the glycomic research by improving the data quality and reducing experimental costs. Glycans including lectins provide both structural and functional diversity to plants and are useful in transgenic technologies to increase resistance to pathogens and pests. Plant glycomics find their applications in biopharming and biopharmaceutics and provides a novel area of advanced glycome research to understand structure–function relationships of glycans. Unraveling the mysteries of glycomics would indeed be very beneficial as sugars play key role in many biological processes such as signaling, stress responses, and immunity.
Type:
Book chapter
,
PeerReviewed
Format:
text
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