Scientists Discover a New Type of Biochemical That Could Be in All Life on Earth

The wonderful mess of molecules that make up living things is so complex, biologists have overlooked an entire class of them – until now. This missed bit of biochemistry is neither rare nor hard to find; it's just no one had thought to look for it before.

"It's really a bombshell because the discovery suggests that there are biomolecular pathways in the cell that are completely unknown to us."

Biologists have a fairly good grasp of our main molecular building blocks. You've got carbohydrates (like starch), lipids (fats), nucleic acids (DNA), and proteins (muscle).

These are further divided into subtypes; for example, cellulose and sugars are carbohydrates. Then there are combinations between these groups, such as when different sugars combine with lipids in a red blood cell, forming the ABO blood types.

Glycans are chains of sugar molecules that can latch onto fats and proteins in a process called glycosylation, helping their transportation through a cell or folding into the correct shapes for their purpose. They are involved in many fundamental processes of biology, from development of embryos to recognition of pathogens.

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