Functional proteomics for the discovery of carbohydrate-related enzyme activities

Carbohydrate metabolism is central to the growth and development of organisms. Thousands of genes that are believed to code for proteins that build and remodel saccharides have been uncovered by genome sequencing projects, thereby necessitating higher-throughput methods to delineate the chemical and biological functions of all these proteins. Recent methods discussed in this review have begun to address this problem by the design of new activity-based probes and mass-differentiated carbohydrate libraries. In addition, a comparative view of carbohydrate-related enzymes from all three branches of life has led to the discovery of unusual enzymes to simplify the synthesis of carbohydrates such as the sugar nucleotides required by glycosyltransferases.