Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) have designed a carbohydrate sequence capable of folding into a stable secondary structure.
Until now, such self-folding biopolymers have only been made for DNA and proteins, and sugars were previously considered too flexible to assume a stable shape. Folded carbohydrates can open completely new perspectives in biomedicine and materials science.
Carbohydrates make up about 80% of the earth’s biomass—half in land and half in the ocean. However, their material properties are still poorly understood. The researchers led by Dr. Martina Delbianco, from the Department of Biomolecular Systems, is interested in how polysaccharides, or long sugar chains, can fold and assemble materials. For example, they discovered how individual chains of glucose join together to create cellulose, the main component of plants.
Using this knowledge, they are now designing unnatural carbohydrates. Their work was inspired by peptide research (short proteins). Knowledge about natural proteins, is used to design synthetic peptide sequences that can adopt programmable 3D shapes and perform specific functions. This method opens up many possibilities, for example in the production of medicine and nanotechnology. Carbohydrates have many opportunities because of their higher abundance and diversity compared to peptides.
In their paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry, shown by Dr. Delbianco and his team found it possible to design glycans that adopt a specific stable conformation in aqueous solution. They combine natural motifs with sugar to create an unnatural shape, a hairpin. In a Lego-like approach, they connected two linear cellulose rods (in blue) to a rigid glycan turn (in green) to obtain a new unnatural shape.
“Carbohydrates can be created with programmable shapes, which opens up the possibility of giving glycans new properties and functions,” said Dr. Martina Delbianco. The structure is easily prepared using “Automated Glycan Assembly” (AGA), a process in which monosaccharides are connected by an automated synthesizer to create polysaccharide sequences. To reveal the 3D structure, the team of Dr. Delbianco used several methods of analysis.
In addition, international researchers like Prof. Jesús Jiménez-Barbero from CIC BioGUNE collaborated with Dr. Martina Delbianco. “The 3D structure of a biomolecule determines its function. This may mean, for example, that in the future we may use nipilo sugars as drugs, as catalysts for chemical transformation, or as structural units for the creation of nanomaterials,” said Dr. Martina Delbianco.
More information:
Giulio Fittolani et al, Synthesis of a glycan hairpin, Nature Chemistry (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41557-023-01255-5
Provided by the Max Planck Society
Citation: New discovery into sugar origami (2023, July 4) retrieved 4 July 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-07-discovery-sugar-origami.html
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