10 building blocks

Until now, it had been extremely difficult to isolate individual complex sugars from breast milk, so synthesising them seemed to be the best solution. To do so, the researchers examined the biosynthesis of the complex sugars, and they discovered that almost all sugars can be made from a combination of a set of 10 building blocks, similar to the way that the 20 amino acids are the building blocks for all proteins.

10 building blocks and 10 enzymes

The sugars that result from these combinations are also dependent on enzymes - biological catalysts - which control their construction. There are many complex sugar synthesizing enzymes, each with its own role. What the researchers have now shown is that most of the complex sugars in human breast milk can be produced in the lab with a combination of the 10 building blocks and a set of 10 enzymes, using them in the correct order.

Contribution to health

“We spent five years uncovering the synthetic route for the first 100 complex sugars, but now we can make many others to study their contribution to human health. We expect that this research will not only lead to better infant nutrition, but also to new therapeutics for a variety of diseases”, Boons said.

This research was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health

Publication

‘Synthesis of asymmetrical multiantennary human milk oligosaccharides’

Anthony R. Prudden, Lin Liu, Chantelle J. Capicciotti, Margreet A. Wolfert*, Shuo Wang, Zhongwei Gao, Lu Meng, Kelley W. Moremen and Geert-Jan Boons*

* affiliated with Utrecht University

PNAS, 27 June 2017, doi 10.1073

Background information

Science for Life

This research is an example of Science for Life, one of the four themes within Utrecht University’s interdisciplinary research programme Life Sciences.

Contact

Monica van der Garde, Press Spokesperson, Faculty of Science, m.vandergarde@uu.nl, 06 13 66 14 38.

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