Essentially everything you wanted to know about sugars: Essentials of Glycobiology, edited by Ajit Varki, Richard Cummings, Jeffrey Esko, Hudson Freeze, Gerald Hart and Jamey Marth

Abstract

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1999. $95.00 (xvii + 653 pages) ISBN 0 87969 560 9Essentials of Glycobiology contains a lot of facts. Are they really all essential? The answer might well be yes. Books with comparable titles covering proteins or nucleic acids are likely to be much shorter. In these fields, the underlying principles can be illustrated by a relatively small set of examples that would generally be judged to be typical. To some extent, when you have seen one gene, you have seen them all. No such luck with glycoconjugates, however, which are a structurally and functionally diverse collection. Thus, the ‘essentials’ referred to in the title of this book are largely examples rather than principles.Essentials of Glycobiology could be a librarian’s nightmare, as it is really four books rolled into one. It could be catalogued under ‘glycobiology’ as ‘history’, ‘methods, ‘text’ or ‘reference’. The emphasis is on the last of these and it is this purpose that the book will serve most effectively. The historical sections, confined to an introductory chapter and brief sections leading off many of the subsequent chapters, are relatively unobtrusive. There are hints of the spiral-bound methods book (often associated with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press) lurking at various points. However, this is definitely not a laboratory manual. A methods section is provided, but it concentrates on the concepts rather than the details. Several chapters found elsewhere in the book, including those on exploring protein–glycan interactions and generating glycosylation mutants in cells and mice, could well have been included in this section. Placement of the methods at the end of the book probably reflects the current trend in journal organization. However, in this case, this arrangement seems appropriate.In attempting to serve so many masters, the authors probably had most trouble making a book suitable for teaching glycobiology. Although parts of the book are designed to be accessible to those who have never heard of terms like ‘glycoconjugate’, this is not a book you want to pick up and read from cover to cover, and I doubt that many students will. For both teaching and reference purposes, I would urge most readers to skip directly to the topics that interest them particularly. Each chapter generally stands on its own, the index is good and many cross-references between chapters have been provided.This is not a multi-author compendium comprising independently written chapters. A generally uniform style has been enforced on all authors, and there is essentially no repetition of material as far as I could detect. In spite of conformity to a common editorial plan, the chapters differ significantly in the style in which material is presented. Several emphasize general principles to the exclusion of examples and therefore might be difficult to follow for a reader not familiar with the underlying experimental information. In contrast, some of the chapters are accessible to the non-specialist, yet are essentially definitive summaries of the topics covered.I particularly enjoyed the chapters on chemical and enzymatic synthesis of glycans, disorders of glycosylation, glycosylation changes in cancer, and nuclear and cytoplasmic glycosylation. My favourite chapter, entitled ‘Structures common to different types of glycans’, is an approachable summary of all of the interesting bits tacked onto the ends of sugar chains that form blood-group determinants, differentiation markers and ligands for adhesion molecules. This subject is complex, but it is presented so that readers can glean the general ideas or go for all the details, depending on their needs and interests. I would have no hesitation in recommending these sections to students and colleagues as the best available material on these topics. In contrast, calnexin and calreticulin make only the briefest of appearances and I would have to point those interested in the role of sugars in quality control in the secretory pathway to other sources of information. The other major gap that I detected was oligosaccharide conformation – there is little in the book to provide a physical sense of how sugars do what they do.When I have shown the book to others, the most common criticism has been that some of the figures are of relatively poor quality. Otherwise, the book is largely free of factual and production errors. The inclusion of a compiled and consistent abbreviations list and a handy key to the symbolic representation of sugar structures inside the front cover were both appreciated. At a price of $95, I would have trouble recommending an investment of this magnitude to students, but I would encourage libraries to have a copy on the shelf.