What is it?

Saccharomics is everything from wet brown-paper bags to cedar-wood pagodas, from glucose energy drinks to potato starch. Saccharomics is the study of molecules made from chains of small sugar molecules: "polysaccharides" which are a type of carbohydrate. You will have heard of some of these, such as glucose (as in Lucozade™) or ribose (as in deoxyribose nucleic acid: DNA).

The thing that makes the study of structural polysaccharides (saccharomics) different from genes (genomics) or proteins (proteomics) is that each sugar molecule can join onto the next at up to six points instead of just two. So whereas genes are long chains of symbols, and proteins are long chains of amino acids (then folded up in complicated ways), polysaccharides can take an enormous variety of bizarre conformations, even before folding is taken into account.

a-D-galacturonic acid (a monosaccharide) showing affinity for water

The second thing that makes saccharomics interesting is its bioinformatics. Whereas there is a fairly direct translation between a sequence of base-pair symbols in a gene and the sequence of amino acids in the corresponding protein, there is no simple relationship whatsoever between the sequence of a set of protein enzymes and the sequence of the polysaccharide that they create. Also the branching possibilities mean that if genomics/proteomics is like a game of Chess, saccharomics is more like a game of Go.

The thing that makes the structural polysaccharides predictable, and therefore a suitable subject for engineering and practical use, is that the multiple bonds per unit mean that the large-scale structure is relatively fixed, and determined by those chemical bonds. This is quite unlike proteins where the large-scale structure is very hard to predict from the sequence of units.

A related area is Glycomics, which is the study of the entirity of the carbohydrates produced by an organism ("the Glycome") which is effectively a study of protein-carbohydrate interactions. About 1% of a mammal's genes code for proteins which interact with carbohydrates.

What does that mean?

Well, to illustrate the richness of the ways in which small sugars can link together, have a look at a diagram illustrating the IUPAC-IUB Biochemical Nomenclature recommendations. Many non-specialists are confused about the distinction between carbohydrates and polysaccharides, since most common carbohydrates that one comes across in everyday foods are actually polysaccharides. The situation was confused for many years until the 1960s. About 3% of all known organic compounds are carbohydrates, and you won't go far wrong if you take the view that all sugars, things like sugars, and things made from sugars (including polysaccharides) are all carbohydrate.

The major types of polysaccharide you will know are starches (food stores in plants), cellulose (structural material in plants, which gives wood its stength and is used to make paper), and pectin (gooey materials familiar from jam-making) and chitin (insect and crustacean shells). There are also agar, agarose, carragenans, dextran, and chitosan.

About Us

We develop new businesses in polysaccharide materials in Cambridge, UK. We explore innovative ideas using bioinformatics and materials science techniques.

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