Glycans for the greater good

ABSTRACT

Carbohydrates are ubiquitous in nature and present across all kingdoms of life – bacteria, fungi,viruses, yeast, plants, animals and humans. They are essential to many biological processes. However,due to their complexity and heterogeneous nature they are often neglected, sometimes referred toas the ‘dark matter’ of biology. Nevertheless, due to their extensive biological impact on health anddisease, glycans and the field of glycobiology have become increasingly popular in recent years, givingrise to glycan-baseddrug development and therapeutics. Forecasting of communicable diseasespredicts that we will see an increase in pandemics of humans and livestock due to global loss ofbiodiversity from changes to land use, intensification of agriculture, climate change and disruption ofecosystems. As such, the development of point-of-caredevices to detect pathogens is vital to preventthe transmission of infectious disease, as we have seen with the COVID-19pandemic. So, can glycansbe exploited to detect COVID-19and other infectious diseases? And is this technology sensitive andaccurate? Here, I discuss the structure and function of glycans, the current glycan-basedtherapeuticsand how glycan binding can be exploited for detection of infectious disease, like COVID-19 © The Authors. Published b 52 y Portland Press Limited under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND)