Carbohydrates are an important part of life and are present in bacteria, fungi, viruses, yeast, plants, animals and humans. The rapid expansion of chemistry and glycobiology over the last few years has provided many new, imaginative and efficient techniques which provide further insight into the structures and biological interactions of carbohydrates and glycostructures.
Comprehensive Glycoscience has a very broad scope and will appeal to a wide audience as it explores the interactions between biology, chemistry and molecular biology towards understanding, synthesising and developing glycoproteins, glycolipids, proteoglyans and polysaccharides, which are important molecules in nature for controlling health and disease and food and feed. Glycocompounds reviewed include: oligosaccharides, polysaccharides, glycoproteins, glycolipids, glycoconjugates, lectins, cellulose, pectins and starch.
Topics covered include: spectroscopy, nomenclature, structures, synthesis, biosynthesis, molecular interactions, degradation, biochemistry, glycobiology, glycotherapeutics and diseases.
- Combines multiple aspects of glycoscience in one comprehensive work
- Documents the new and rapid expansion of carbohydrate chemistry and glycobiology over the last few years
- Highlights the many new, imaginative and efficient techniques for providing insights into carbohydrates and glycostructures
Dr. Barchi received his Ph.D. in Synthetic/Marine Natural Products Chemistry from the University of Hawaii and was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. He then joined the National Cancer Institute as a staff fellow in the Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry in1988 where he rose to his current position of Senior Scientist/Principal Investigator and NMR Facility Head at the newly formed Chemical Biology Laboratory. His main research interests are in synthetic medicinal chemistry as it relates to carbohydrate-based drug design, the development of novel sugar-conjugated nanoparticles and the high-resolution structural analysis of sugars, glycopeptides and small molecule drug candidates by NMR spectroscopy. Dr Barchi’s career at the NCI has spanned a wide breadth of drug discovery efforts, including the synthesis of PKC and reverse transcriptase inhibitors, the development of glycopeptide antigens as vaccine candidates against HIV and cancer, as well as the discovery of several glycopeptide-analogues of Antiproliferative Factor (APF), a negative growth factor isolated from patients with interstitial cystitis. Current focus in the lab is the discovery of novel nanoplatforms for the delivery and therapeutic applications of immunogenic glycopeptides, the search for selective antitumor agents based on APF and the conformational analysis of these synthetic analogues by NMR spectroscopy to guide further discovery efforts. He is on the editorial board of Current Cancer Drug Targets (Bentham Science Publishers) and Carbohydrate Research (Elsevier) and was a guest editor for Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry (Bentham Science Publishers), on The Art of Drug Design and Discovery. He has an h-index of 35.
