Sweet! The cell’s sugary coating comes into view
Esther Landhuis
In the biological drama that is a cell’s life, you might think of DNA as the playwright, RNA as the director and proteins as the stars of the show. But life, and living things, are rarely so simple. It turns out that a less understood set of players — a crew of sugar structures known as glycans — gives added nuance and meaning to the action on the cellular stage.
For decades, compared with other biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids, these cellular sugar coatings were relatively...