Sugar recognition: designing artificial receptors for applications in biological diagnostics and imaging.

At the cellular level, numerous processes ranging from protein folding to disease development are mediated by a sugar-based molecular information system that is much less well known than its DNA- or protein-based counterparts. The subtle structural diversity of such sugar tags nevertheless offers an excellent, if challenging, opportunity to design receptors for the selective recognition of biorelevant sugars. Over the past 40 years, growing interest in the field of sugar recognition has led to the development of several promising artificial receptors, which could soon find widespread use in medical diagnostics and cell imaging.