Question: how many different kinds of sugars are their in your body?

Jean Bourke answered on 15 Nov 2012:

Hi Roisin! That is a fantastic question. To be honest we don’t actually know but we are trying to find out! Glucose may be nature’s food of choice but there are many different types of sugars.

Glucose is what we call a monosaccharide coz there’s just one on its own.You can link us sugars to make di and tri saccharides. When you have lots linked up together you have what we call a polysaccharide. Starch is a polysaccharide as is chitin which makes the hard outer shell of insects like beetles. So there are lots of different single sugars (monosaccharides) that can be linked up to make chains of different length and these chains are also called sugars.

And for even more variety there are many ways to link them up. You can link the top of one with the bottom of another, or the back of one with the side of another and so on.

Because of these 2 reasons there’s an almost infinite number of sugars you can make. This is why nature uses sugars as informations carriers. How many there are of each type and how they are linked up is not random, it means something.

The outside of every single one of our cells is covered in sugars saying various thing: how old the cell is, what kind of cell it is (is it a blood cell or a brain cell) as well as what the cell is currently doing. This is quite a new area in science and we are only just starting to understand a bit of it which is why it’s a really fascinating area to work in.

So in your body you have all the sugars that coat the outside of all your cells AND all the good bacteria in you gut are also covered in sugars so you have those in you too!

I find all of this really exciting: if you know what sugars are on the outside of a particular cell, say a cancer cell, you can use this knowledge to send you cancer drugs straight there and so you need less drug and you can reduce the side effects and kill the cancer! Some of my friends are working on this right now and it’s looking good so far!

I study the sugars on the outside of bad bacteria that cause a disease called tuberculosis. We are trying to find out what kind of information they carry as this is how they talk to your immune system.

Phew long answer but this is my area and I love it!