Megan Stephan | Aug 1, 2004 | 7 min read
To the lay public, sugars are the villains behind expanding waistlines and rotting teeth, and until recently, the view from the lab bench was not much different. Sugars were considered so irrelevant, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ram Sasisekharan, that biochemists "mainly developed tools to remove them from proteins they were studying."Today, however, the mood is decidedly different. Sugars, or more properly, the complex sugars called glycans, are now recognized as critic