The 1990s may well be remembered in biology as the decade of the gene, culminating in the completion of the Human Genome Project's working draft. And the next big thing in medicine may be the study of the proteins coded for by all those genes (see "The Proteomics Payoff"). But even as doctors and drug companies struggle to interpret and exploit the recent explosion of data on genes and proteins, yet another field of biology is waiting to break out: glycomics. This emerging discipline seeks to do for sugars and carbohydrates what genomics and proteomics have done for genes and proteins-move them into the mainstream of biomedical research and drug discovery.

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