Physiological significance of Fuc and Sialic acid containing glycans in the body

Complex biomolecular machinery carrying diverse glycan chains are involved in a wide range of physiological activities including blood group determination, cancer recognition protein stabilization and sperm-egg interaction. Diversity of glycan chains, linked to lipids and proteins is due to isomeric and conformational modifications of various sugar residues, giving rise to unique carbohydrate structures with a wide range of anomeric linkages. This unique and significant structural diversity of naturally occurring oligosaccharide structures make them the best recognition markers for countless physiological activities. This is a challenging task to explore the relationship between biological processes and stereochemical behavior of sugar residues. Current review article is related with the physiological significance of glycans carrying fucose and/or sialic residues in complex biomolecular assemblies. Both the sugar units have a diverse range of anomery and linkages with the penultimate sugars. The existing literature and databases did not contain comprehensive information regarding structure-function relationship of glycans. Therefore, the current study is scheduled to debate on the structure-function relationship of glycans carrying Fuc and sialic acid in their backbone structures. (C) 2011 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.