Contents Online
Communications in Information and Systems
Volume 21 (2021)
Number 1
Carbohydrate-protein interactions: advances and challenges
Pages: 147 – 163
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4310/CIS.2021.v21.n1.a7
Authors
Abstract
A carbohydrate, also called saccharide in biochemistry, is a biomolecule consisting of carbon (C), hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) atoms. For example, sugars are low molecular-weight carbohydrates, and starches are high molecular-weight carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the most abundant organic substances in nature and essential constituents of all living things. Protein-carbohydrate interactions play important roles in many biological processes, such as cell growth, differentiation, and aggregation. They also have broad applications in pharmaceutical drug design. In this review, we will summarize the characteristic features of protein-carbohydrate interactions and review the computational methods for structure prediction, energy calculations, and kinetic studies of protein-carbohydrate complexes. Finally, we will discuss the challenges in this field.
Keywords
carbohydrate-protein interactions, saccharide-protein interactions, sugar-protein binding, structure prediction, molecular docking, drug discovery
This work was supported by NIH grants R01GM109980 and R35GM136409 to Xiaoqin Zou.
Received 15 December 2020
Published 8 February 2021