GlycanAge Blog: Glycoscience · Page 2

A Roadmap to Future

A great deal of achieving a sustainable tomorrow relies on making roadmaps for a required targeted research today. For that reason, member states of the United Nations created an initiative in 2015 for reaching global sustainability by 2030. This agenda consists of 17 Sustainable Growth Goals, and glycoscience plays a…

Published:
November 11, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

Predicting Vulnerability to Stress Using Glycans

We all react differently to stress. For example, it’s known that only 10-20% of people exposed to traumatic events will go on to develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a severe mental health condition that dramatically impacts on people’s quality of life. This suggests that there is some diversity in the human…

Published:
July 26, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

How Does GlycanAge Compare to Methylation as a Biomarker for Biological Age?

Published:
May 11, 2020

Measure, Normalise, Analyse

Glycans are complex sugar molecules that are present on the majority of proteins in the human body. As such, glycans have shown great potential as biomarkers of both biological and chronological ages, as well as various diseases, including cancer and autoimmune diseases. Large sample sizes need to be measured for stud…

Published:
April 7, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

Glycosylation Profile of Sars-Cov-2 Spike Protein

A novel human coronavirus, named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which emerged in Wuhan, is currently one of the major health problems in the world. SARS-CoV-2 causes a respiratory illness named Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and so far, we have 1 276 732 reported cases of COVID-19 and 56…

Published:
April 6, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

Understanding Glycans in COVID-19 Drug Design

Coronaviruses have been around for centuries. The 21st century brought three known to cause severe human disease and global transmission concerns: SARS-CoV in 2002; MERS-CoV in 2012; and most recently SARS-CoV-2, which arose in 2019, causing an international pandemic. Given the substantial morbidity and mortality rate…

Published:
April 2, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

Glycans in Drug Discovery - HIV Glycopeptide Antigens

Glycoproteins found at the surface of several viruses are called viral envelope glycoproteins and they are great targets for virus neutralisation. Synthetic glycopeptides that mimic natural HIV envelope glycoproteins have been considered as anti-HIV therapy. Viral envelope glycoproteins, such as gp120 in HIV-1, have g…

Published:
April 2, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

The Importance of IgG Glycosylation in Drug Development

Antibodies can be used preventatively as vaccines, but also as post-diagnosis treatment for many human diseases including cancer and immunologic illnesses. Both the production and market of therapeutic antibodies have undergone exponential growth in the past few years, and this trend is not expected to stop anytime so…

Published:
April 1, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

The Sars-Cov-2 Spike Protein Is Densely Glycosylated

The spike protein is a trimeric protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2. This protein gives the whole viral family a crown-like appearance by forming spikes on their surface, hence their name – corona (Latin for crown). The spike protein mediates receptor recognition and membrane fusion during host cell infection. Du…

Published:
March 26, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

Glycans in Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is technology, science and engineering conducted at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers, to create, manipulate, and characterize structures on those scales. As it is shown, glycans are applicable biomarkers for medical diagnostic. It is known that material properties are changed on nanosca…

Published:
March 26, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

Have Glycans Finally Found a Place in Medicine?

Complex sugar molecules called glycans are an essential component to life as we know it since they are estimated to be the most abundant class of organic molecules on Earth. They are present in all domains of life, taking different shapes and sizes – from a single monosaccharide to the complex polysaccharides containi…

Published:
March 26, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes

Intestinal Microbiota and Glycosylation

The human colon is extensively colonized with bacteria, fungi, and viruses. This colony of commensal, symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms remains stable throughout the years but can change in some diseases (e.g., inflammatory bowel disease, HIV infection) and as a result of different environmental factors (e.g., d…

Published:
March 25, 2020 Reading time:
5 minutes