While this volume is mainly dedicated to the investigation and utilisation of carbohydrate‐specific enzymes, the reader will also find enzymology and glycobiology combined with glycochemistry, demonstrating how the interdisciplinary approaches taken in the glycosciences contribute to the increasingly important field of glycomics.

The first chapter of this book is dedicated to the radical bromination of sugars, involving a broad range of substrates and their transformations. It highlights the synthetic utility of this type of reactions and, in particular, the uniqueness of carbohydrates as substrates, leading to a wide variety of molecular tools for chemical glycobiology. Examples are given of acceptor substrate analogues for glycosyltransferases, inhibitors of glycosidases, compounds that inactivate retaining N‐acetylglucosaminidases, amongst many other bioactive compounds that were synthesized via radical‐mediated halogenation of carbohydrates. While the first chapter is dedicated to synthetic organic glycochemistry, the second illustrates the importance of enzymatic and chemoenzymatic syntheses for the production of the polysaccharide heparin, marketed as anticoagulant agent. Recent developments on synthetic glycolipids as ligands and as inhibitors of mycobacterial cell wall components, biosynthesis and functions are described in chapter 3, also focusing on the inhibition of key glycosyltransferases by glycolipids. The next chapters deal with carbohydrate‐processing enzymes and their inhibitors, most of them small molecule inhibitors. Design and synthesis of glycosyltransferase and glycosidase inhibitors is reviewed, paying particular attention to imino sugars and to carbohydrate epoxides as synthetic key intermediates of this important class of therapeutic targets, with applications in the treatment of influenza infection, cancer, AIDS, and diabetes. Also an overview on glycosidase metabolic changes in diabetes is presented. The deficiency in humans of hexosaminidases causes severe neurodegenerative disorders, including the Alzheimer's disease. Hence a survey of the most efficient and selective inhibitors of these glycosidases, required for the research of their physiological functions, is given in this volume. In recent years binding sites of carbohydrate‐specific enzymes have been investigated in greater detail, with special focus on surface and secondary binding sites (SBS). SBS, playing several supporting roles in enzyme function, are binding sites that are located on the catalytic domain of a particular enzyme, but separate from the enzyme’s main active site. Another chapter is devoted to this interesting area of research that aims to modulate enzymatic behavior without altering the enzyme active site, focusing on SBS potential roles, techniques for SBS study and applications. The last but not the least, X‐ray crystallography of lectins is the subject of a chapter, emphasizing the characterization of lectin‐carbohydrate complexes with high precision, and revealing in detail the underlying molecular recognition mechanisms.

Volume 39 contains chapters covering chemical, biochemical and biological approaches that demonstrate, in a meaningful way, how interdisciplinary approaches in the glycosciences help to advance and appreciate our understanding of the biological processes involving carbohydrates that may be controlled to promote health and prevent disease.

Amélia Pilar Rauter

Thisbe K. Lindhorst