Medicinal chemistry is both science and art. The science of medicinal chemistry offers mankind one of its best hopes for improving the quality of life. The art of medicinal chemistry continues to challenge its practitioners with the need for both intuition and experience to discover new drugs. Hence sharing the experience of drug research is uniquely beneficial to the field of medicinal chemistry. Drug research requires interdisciplinary team-work at the interface between chemistry, biology and medicine. Therefore, the topic-related series Topics in Medicinal Chemistry covers all relevant aspects of drug research, e.g. pathobiochemistry of diseases, identification and validation of (emerging) drug targets, structural biology, drugability of targets, drug design approaches, chemogenomics, synthetic chemistry including combinatorial methods, bioorganic chemistry, natural compounds, high-throughput screening, pharmacological in vitro and in vivo investigations, drug-receptor interactions on the molecular level, structure-activity relationships, drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination, toxicology and pharmacogenomics. In general, special volumes are edited by well known guest editors.

Medicinal chemistry is both science and art. The science of medicinal chemistry offers mankind one of its best hopes for improving the quality of life. The art of medicinal chemistry continues to challenge its practitioners with the need for both intuition and experience to discover new drugs. Hence sharing the experience of drug research is uniquely beneficial to the field of medicinal chemistry. Drug research requires interdisciplinary team-work at the interface between chemistry, biology and medicine. Therefore, the topic-related series Topics in Medicinal Chemistry covers all relevant aspects of drug research, e.g. pathobiochemistry of diseases, identification and validation of (emerging) drug targets, structural biology, drugability of targets, drug design approaches, chemogenomics, synthetic chemistry including combinatorial methods, bioorganic chemistry, natural compounds, high-throughput screening, pharmacological in vitro and in vivo investigations, drug-receptor interactions on the molecular level, structure-activity relationships, drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination, toxicology and pharmacogenomics. In general, special volumes are edited by well known guest editors.

The aim of the book is to provide a succinct overview of the current status of glycoscience from both basic biological and medical points of view and to propose future directions, in order to facilitate further integrations of glycoscience with other fields in biological and medical studies. Glycans (carbohydrate oligomers) are the so-called "building blocks" of carbohydrates, nucleic acids, proteins and lipids and play major roles in many biological phenomena as well as in various pathophysiological processes. However, this area of glycoscience has been neglected from the research community because glycan structures are very complex and functionally diverse and as compared to proteins and nucleic acids simple tools for the amplification, sequencing and auto-synthesis of glycans are not available. Many scientists in other fields of research have now realized that glycosylation, i.e. the addition of glycans to a protein backbone, is the most abundant post translational modification reactions and is an important field of research and sometimes they require a glycobiology and/or glycochemistry approach to be used. It is still difficult, however, for non-expert researchers to use these techniques. This book provides numerous but simple overviews of current topics and protocols for the experiments. The book is aimed at university students and above, including non-experts in the field of glycoscience.